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AMIEL'S| JOURNAL 


THE JOURNAL INTIME 


oF 


HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL 


TRANSLATED 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
BY 


MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 
Author of “The History of David Grieve," ete. 


WITH A PORTRAIT 


VOL. L 


NEW YORK 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


Lonpon: Macmititan & Co., Lrp. 


1903 


All rights reserved 


CopyriGut, 1893, 
By MACMILLAN AND co. 


First Edition (2 Vols. Globe 8vo) 1885. Second 
Edition (x Vol. Crown 8vo) 1888. Reprinted 1889; 
January and October, 1890; March and Septem- 
ber, 1891, 1892; January and April, 1893; Janu- 
ary, August, 1894 ; August, 1895; March, 1896; 
October, 1897; March, 1899; July, 1900 ; October, 
igor; June, 1903. 


Nortwoobd iress : 
J.S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith. 
Boston, Mass., U.S.A. 








cg 
Q1IS2R 
Or7ZsE 
1383 
vo | 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND 
EDITION. 


N this second edition of the English 
translation of Amiel's Journal Intime, 
I have inserted a good many new passages, 
taken from the last French edition (Cin- 
quiéme édition, revue et augmentée). But 
I have not translated all the fresh material 
to be found in that edition, nor have I 

x omitted certain sections of the Journal 
which in these two recent volumes have 

_ been omitted by their French editors. It 
& would be of no interest to give my reasons 
YY for these variations at length. They depend 
upon certain differences between the Eng- 

. lish and the French public, which are more 
readily felt than explained. Some of the 

g passages which I have left untranslated 
seemed to me to overweight the introspec- 
NS side of the Journal, already so full — 


AUG 20 1Y30 


to overweight it, at any rate, for English 
ders. Others which I have retained, 


29942 


vi AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


though they often relate to local names and 
books, more or less unfamiliar to the gen- 
eral public, yet seemed to me valuable as 
supplying some of that surrounding detail, 
that setting, which helps one to understand 
a life. Besides, we English are in many 
ways more akin to Protestant and Puritan 
Geneva than the French readers to whom 
the original Journal primarily addresses 
itself, and some of the entries I have kept 
have probably, by the nature of things, 
more savour for us than for them. 


M. A, W. 





THE new and enlarged Index affixed to the 
present Edition is due to the care and pains of 
Mr. George Seton of St. Bennet’s, Edinburgh, 
to whom the Translator desires to express her 
sincere thanks. 


viii 


PREFACE. 


HIS translation of Amiel’s Journal In- 
time is primarily addressed to those 
whose knowledge of French, while it may be: 
sufficient to carry them with more or less 
complete understanding through'a novel or 
a newspaper, is yet not enough to allow. 
them to understand and appreciate a book 
containing subtle and complicated forms of 
expression. I believe there are many such 
to be found among the reading public, and 
among those who would naturally take a: 
strong interest in such a life and mind as 
Amiel’s, were it notfor the barrier of lan- 
guage. It is, at any rate, in the hope that 
a certain number of additional readers may 
be thereby attracted to the Journal Intime 
that this translation of it has been under- 
taken. 

The difficulties of the translation have 
been sometimes considerable, owing, first of 
all, to those elliptical modes of speech which 
a man naturally employs when he is writ- 

1x 


x AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


ing for himself and not for the public, but 
which a translator at all events is bound in 
some degree to expand. Every here and 
there Amiel expresses himself in a kind of 
shorthand, perfectly intelligible to a French- 
man, but for which an English equivalent, 
at once terse and clear, is hard to find. 
Another difficulty has been his constant use 
of a technical philosophical language, which, 
according to his French critics, is not 
French —even philosophical French — but 
German. Very often it has been impossi- 
ble to give any other than a literal render- 
ing of such passages, if the thought of the 
original was to be preserved ; but in those 
cases where a choice was open to me, I 
have preferred the more literary to the 
more technical expression ; and I have been 
encouraged to do so by the fact that Amiel, 
when he came to prepare for publication a 
certain number of Pensées, extracted from 
the Journal, and printed at the end of a 
volume of poems published in 1853, fre- 
quently softened his phrases, so that sen- 
tences which survive in the Journal in a 
more technical form are to be found in a 
more literary form in the Grains de Mil. 

In two or three cases— not more, I think 
—I have allowed myself to transpose a 


PREFACE. xi 


sentence bodily, and in a few instances I 
have added some explanatory words to the 
text, which, wherever the addition was of 
any importance, are indicated by square 
brackets. 

My warmest thanks are due to my friend 
and critic, M. Edmond Scherer, from whose 
yaluable and interesting study, prefixed to 
the French Journal, as well as from certain 
materials in his possession which he has 
very kindly allowed me to make use of, I 
have drawn by far the greater part of the 
biographical material embodied in the In- 
troduction. M. Scherer has also given me 
help and advice through the whole process 
of translation — advice which his scholarly 
knowledge of English has made especially 
worth having. 

In the translation of the more technical 
philosophical passages I have been greatly 
helped by another friend, Mr. Bernard 
Bosanquet, Fellow of University College, 
Oxford, the translator of Lotze, of whose 
care and pains in the matter I cherish a 
grateful remembrance. 

But with all the help that has been so 
freely given me, not only by these friends 
but by others, I confide the little book to 
the public with many a misgiving! May it 


xii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. : 


at least win a few more friends and readers 
here and there for one who lived alone, and 
died sadly persuaded that his life had been 
a barren mistake ; whereas, all the while — 
such is the irony of things —he had been 
in reality working out the mission assigned 
him in the spiritual economy, and faithfully 
obeying the secret mandate which had im- 
pressed itself upon his youthful conscious- 
ness: — ‘ Let the living live ; and you, gather 
together your thoughts, leave behind you a@ 
legacy of Jedling and ideas; you will be 
most useful so,’ 
Mary A. Warp. 


INTRODUCTION. 


“*T was in the last days of December 1882 
that the first volume of Henri Frédéric 
Amiel’s Journal Intime was published at 
Geneva. ‘The book, of which the general 
literary world knew nothing prior to its 
appearance, contained a long and remark- 
able Introduction from the pen of M. Ed- 
mond Scherer, the well-known French critic, 
who had been for many years one of Amiel’s 
most valued friends, and it was prefaced 
also by a little Avertissement, in which the 
‘Editors’ —that is to say, the Genevese 
friends to whom the care and publication of 
the Journal had been in the first instance 
entrusted — described in a few reserved and 
sober words the genesis and objects of the 
publication. Some thousands of sheets of 
Journal, covering a period of more than 
thirty years, had come into the hands of 
‘Amiel’s literary heirs. ‘They were writ- 
ten,’ said the Avertissement, ‘ with several 
ends in view. Amiel recorded in them his 
xl 


xiv AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


various occupations, and the incidents of 
each day. He preserved in them his psy- 
chological observations, and the impressions 
produced on him by books. But his Journal 
was, above all, the confidant of his most 
private and intimate thoughts; a means 
whereby the thinker became conscious of 
his own inner life; a safe shelter wherein 
his questionings of fate and the future, the 
voice of grief, of self-examination and con- 
fession, the soul’s cry for inward peace, 
might make themselves freely heard. . . . 
In the directions concerning his papers 
which he left behind him, Amiel expressed 
the wish that his literary executors should 
publish those parts of the Journal which 
might seem to them to possess either in- 
terest as thought or value as experience. 
The publication of this volume is the fulfil- 
ment of this desire. — The reader will find 
in it, not a volume of Memoirs, but the con- 
fidences of a solitary thinker, the medita- 
tions of a philosopher for whom the things 
of the soul were the sovereign realities of 
existence.’ 

Thus modestly announced, the little vol- 
ume made its quiet début. It contained 
nothing, or almost nothing, of ordinary 
biographical material. M. Scherer’s Intro- 


INTRODUCTION. XV 


duction supplied such facts as were abso- 
lutely necessary to the understanding of 
Amiel’s intellectual history, but nothing 
more. Everything of a local or private 
character that could be excluded was ex- 
cluded. The object of the Editors in their 
choice of passages for publication was de- 
clared to be simply ‘the reproduction of the 
moral and intellectual physiognomy of their 
friend,’ while M. Scherer expressly dis- 
claimed any biographical intentions, and 
limited his Introduction as far as possible 
to ‘a study of the character and thought of 
Amiel.’ The contents of the volume, then, 
were purely literary and philosophical ; its 
prevailing tone was a tone of introspection, 
and the public which can admit the claims 
and overlook the inherent defects of intro- 
spective literature has always been a small 
one. The writer of the Journal had been 
during his lifetime wholly unknown to the 
general European public. In Geneva itself 
he had been commonly regarded as a man 
who had signally disappointed the hopes 
and expectations of his friends, whose re- 
serve and indecision of character had in 
many respects spoilt his life, and alienated 
the society around him; while his profes- 
sorial lectures were generally pronounced 


xvl AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


dry and unattractive, and the few volumes 
of poems which represented almost his only 
contributions to literature had nowhere 
met with any real cordiality of reception. 
Those concerned, therefore, in the publica- 
tion of the first volume of the Journal can 
hardly have had much expectation of a wide 
success. Geneva is not a favourable start- 
ing-point for a French book, and it may 
well have seemed that not even the support 
of M. Scherer’s name would be likely to 
carry the volume beyond a small local 
circle. 

But ‘wisdom is justified of her children !’ 
It is now nearly three years since the first 
volume of the Journal Intime appeared ; 
the impression made by it was deepened 
and extended by the publication of the 
second volume in 1884; and it is now not 
too much to say that this remarkable record 
of a life has made its way to what promises 
to be a permanent place in literature. 
Among those who think and read it is be- 
ginning to be generally recognised that an- 
other book has been added to the books 
which live— not to those, perhaps, which 
live in the public view, much discussed, 
much praised, the objects of feeling and of 
struggle, but to those in which a germ of 


"INTRODUCTION. XVii 


permanent life has been deposited silently, 
almost secretly, which compel no homage 
‘and excite no rivalry, and which owe the 
‘place that the world half-unconsciously 
yields to them to nothing but that inde- 
structible sympathy of man with man, that 
eternal answering of feeling to feeling, 
which is one of the great principles, per- 
haps the greatest principle, at the root of 
literature. M. Scherer naturally was the 
first among the recognised guides of opinion 
to attempt the placing of his friend’s Jour- 
nal. ‘The man who, during his lifetime, 
was incapable of giving us any deliberate 
or conscious work worthy of his powers, 
has now left us, after his death, a book 
which will not die. For the secret of 
Amiel’s malady is sublime, and the expres- 
sion of it wonderful.’ So ran one of the 
last paragraphs of the Introduction, and 
one may see in the sentences another in- 
stance of that courage, that reasoned rash- 
ness, which distinguishes the good from 
the mediocre critic. For it is as true now 
as it was in the days when La Bruyére 
rated the critics of his time for their in- 
capacity to praise, and praise at once, that 
‘the surest test of a man’s critical power is 
his judgment of contemporaries.’ M. Re- 


xviii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


nan, I think, with that exquisite literary 
sense of his, was the next among the 
authorities to mention Amiel’s name with 
the emphasis it deserved. He quoted a 
passage from the Journal in his Preface to 
the Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse, 
describing it as the saying ‘d’un penseur 
distingué, M. Amiel de Genéve.’? Since 
then M. Renan has devoted two curious 
articles to the completed Journal in the 
Journal des Debats. The first object of 
these reviews, no doubt, was not so much 
the critical appreciation of Amiel as the 
development of certain paradoxes which 
have been haunting various corners of M. 
Renan’s mind for several years past, and 
to which it is to be hoped he has now given 
expression with sufficient emphasis and 
brusquerie to satisfy even his passion for 
intellectual adventure. Still, the rank of 
the book was fully recognised, and the first 
article especially contained some remark- 
able criticisms, to which we shall find occa- 
sion to recur. ‘In these two volumes of 
pensées,’ said M. Renan, ‘ without any sac- 
rifice of truth to artistic effect, we have both 
the perfect mirror of a modern mind of the 
best type, matured by the best modern cult- 
ure, and also a striking picture of the suf- 


INTRODUCTION. x1xX 


ferings which beset the sterility of genius. 
These two volumes may certainly be reck- 
oned among the most interesting philo- 
sophical writings which have appeared of 
late years.’ 

M. Caro’s article on the first volume of 
the Journal, in the Revue des Deux Mondes 
for February 1883, may perhaps count as 
the first introduction of the book to the 
general cultivated public. He gave a care- 
ful analysis of the first half of the Journal, 
—resumed eighteen nfonths later in the 
same periodical on the appearance of the 
second volume,—and, while protesting 
against what he conceived to be the general 
‘tendency and effect of Amiel’s mental story, 
he showed himself fully conscious of the 
rare and delicate qualities of the new writer. 
‘La réverie a réussi a notre auteur,’ he 
says, a little reluctantly —for M. Caro has 
his doubts as to the legitimacy of réverie ; 
‘il ena fait une ceuvre qui restera.’ The 
same final judgment, accompanied by a 
very different series of comments, was pro- 
nounced on the Journal a year later by M. 
Paul Bourget, a young and rising writer, 
whose article is perhaps chiefly interesting 
as showing the kind of effect produced by 
Amiel’s thought on minds of a type essen- 


xx AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


tially alien from hisown. There is a leaven 
of something positive and austere, of some- 
thing which, for want of a better name, 
one calls Puritanism, in Amiel, which es- 
capes the author of Une Cruelle Enigme. 
But whether he has understood Amiel or 
no, M. Bourget is fully alive to the mark 
which the Journal is likely to make among 
modern records of mental history. He, 
too, insists that the book is already famous 
and will remain so; in the first place, be- 
cause of its inexorable realism and sincer- 
ity ; in the seeond, because it is the most 
perfect example available of a certain vari- 
ety of the modern mind. 

Amongst ourselves, although the Journal 
has attracted the attention of all who keep 
a vigilant eye on the progress of foreign 
literature, and although one or two appre- 
ciative articles have appeared on it in the 
magazines, the book has still to become 
generally known. One remarkable English 
testimony to it, however, must be quoted. 
Six months after the publication of the first 
volume, the late Mark Pattison, who since 
then has himself bequeathed to literature a 
strange and memorable fragment of auto- 
biography, addressed a letter to M. Scherer 
as the editor of the Journal Intime, which 


INTRODUCTION. XX} 


M. Scherer has since published, nearly a 
year after the death of the writer. The 
words have a strong and melancholy inter- 
est for all who knew Mark Pattison; and 
they certainly deserve a place in- any 
attempt to estimate the impression already 
made on contemporary thought by the 
Journal Intime. 

‘I wish to convey to you, sir,’ writes the 
Rector of Lincoln, ‘the thanks of one at. 
least of the public for giving the light to 
this precious record of a unique experience. 
I say unique, but I can vouch that there is 
in existence at least one other soul which 
has lived through the same struggles, men- 
tal and moral, as Amiel. In your pathetic 
description of the volonté qui voudrait vou- 
loir, mais impuissante & se fournir & elle- 
méme des motifs, —of the repugnance for all 
action—the soul petrified by the sentiment 
of the infinite, in all this I recognise myself. 
Celui qui a déchiffré le secret de la vie finie, 
qui en a lu le mot, est sorti du monde des 
vivants, il est mort de fait. I can feel for- 
cibly the truth of this, as it applies to my- 
self | , 

‘It is not, however, with the view of 
thrusting my egotism upon you that I have 
ventured upon addressing you. As I can- 


Xxii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


not suppose that so peculiar a psychological 
revelation will enjoy a wide popularity, I 
think it a duty to the editor to assure him 
that there are persons in the world whose 
souls respond, in the depths of their inmost 
nature, to the cry of anguish which makes 
itself heard in the pages of these remarkable 
confessions.’ 

So much for the place which the Journal 
—the fruit of so many years of painful 
thought and disappointed effort — seems to 
be at last securing for its author among 
those contemporaries who in his lifetime 
knew nothing of him. It is a natural con- 
sequence of the success of the book that 
the more it penetrates, the greater desire 
there is to know something more than its 
original editors and M. Scherer have yet 
told us about the personal history of the 
man who wrote it—about his education, 
his habits, and his friends. Perhaps some 
day this wish may find its satisfaction. It 
is an innocent one, and the public may 
even be said to have a kind of right to 
know as much as can be told it of the 
personalities which move and stir it. At 
present the biographical material available 
is extremely scanty, and if it were not for 
the kindness of M. Scherer, who has allowed 


INTRODUCTION. xxiii 


the present writer access to certain manu- 
script material in his possession, even the 
sketch which follows, vague and imperfect 
as it necessarily is, would have been im- 
possible.* 

Henri Frédéric Amiel was born at Geneva 
in September 1821. He belonged to one of 
the emigrant families, of which a more or 
less steady supply had enriched the little 
Republic during the three centuries follow- 
ing the Reformation. Amiel’s ancestors, 
like those of Sismondi, left Languedoc for 
Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of 
Nantes. His father must have been a youth 
at the time when Geneva passed into the 
power of the French Republic, and would 
seem to have married and settled in the 
haleyon days following the restoration of 
Genevese independence in 1814. Amiel was 
born when the prosperity of Geneva was at 
its height, when the little State was ad- 
ministered by men of European reputation, 
and Genevese society had power to attract 


* Four or five articles on the subject of Amiel’s 
life have been contributed to the Révue Internati- 
onale by Mdlle. Berthe Vadier during the passage 
of the present book through the press. My knowl- 
edge of them, however, came too late to enable me 
to make use of them for the purposes of the present 
introduction. 


xxiv. AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


distinguished visitors and admirers from all 
parts. The veteran Bonstetten, who had 
been the friend of Gray and the associate 
of Voltaire, was still talking and enjoying 
life in his appartement overlooking the 
woods of La Batie. Rossi and Sismondi 
were busy lecturing to the Genevese youth, 
or taking part in Genevese legislation ; an 
active scientific group, headed by the 
Pictets, De la Rive, and the botanist 
Auguste-Pyrame de Candolle, kept the 
country abreast of European thought and 
speculation, while the mixed nationality of. 
the place—the blending in it of French 
keenness with Protestant enthusiasms and. 
Protestant solidity — was beginning to find - 
inimitable and characteristic expression in 
the stories of Topffer. The country was 
governed by an aristocracy, which was not. 
so much an aristocracy of birth as one of 
merit and intellect, and the moderate con- 
stitutional ideas which represented the 
Liberalism of the post-Waterloo period 
were nowhere more warmly embraced or 
more intelligently carried out than in 
Geneva. ' 

During the years, however, which im- 
mediately followed Amiel’s birth, some 
signs of decadence began to be visible in 


INTRODUCTION. XXV- 


this brilliant Genevese society. The gener- 
ation which had waited for, prepared, and 
controlled, the Restoration of 1814, was 
falling into the background, and the younger 
generation, with allits respectability, wanted 
energy, above all, wanted leaders. The 
revolutionary forces in the State, which had 
made themselves violently felt during the 
civil turmoils of the period preceding the 
assembly of the French States General, and 
had afterwards produced the miniature 
Terror which forced Sismondi into exile, 
had been for a while laid to sleep by the 
events of 1814. But the slumber was a 
short one at Geneva as elsewhere, and when 
Rossi quitted the Republic for France in 
1833, he did so with a mind full of misgiv- 
ings as to the political future of the little 
State which had given him —an exile and 
a Catholic —so generous a welcome in 1819. 
The ideas of 1830 were shaking the fabric 
and disturbing the equilibrium of the Swiss 
Confederation as a whole, and of many of 
the cantons composing it. Geneva was still 
apparently tranquil while her neighbours 
were disturbed, but no one looking back on 
the history of the Republic, and able to 
measure the strength of the Radical force 
in Europe after the fall of Charles X., could 


xxvi AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


have felt much doubt but that a few more 
years would bring Geneva also into the 
whirlpool of political change. 

In the same year — 1833 — that M. Rossi 
had left Geneva, Henri Frédéric Amiel, at 
twelve years old, was left orphaned of both 
his parents. They had died comparatively 
young, —his mother was only just over 
thirty, and his father cannot have been 
much older. On the death of the mother 
the little family was broken up, the boy 
passing into the care of one relative, his 
two sisters into that of another. Certain 
notes in M. Scherer’s possession throw a 
little light here and there upon a childhood 
and youth which must necessarily have 
been a little bare and forlorn. They show 
fs a sensitive impressionable boy, of health 
rather delicate than robust, already disposeé 
to a more or less melancholy and dreamy 
view of life, and showing a deep interest in 
those religious problems and ideas in which 
the air of Geneva has been steeped since 
the days of Calvin. The religious teaching 
which a Genevese lad undergoes prior to 
his admission to full Church membership, 
made a deep impression on him, and certain 
mystical elements of character, which re- 
mained strong in him to the end, showed 


INTRODUCTION. - Ayxvi 


themselves very early. At the Collége or 
Public School of Geneva, and at the Aca- 
démie, he would seem to have done only 
moderately as far as prizes and honours 
were concerned. We aré told, however, 
that he read enormously, and that he was, 
generally speaking, inclined rather to make 
friends with men older than himself than 
with his contemporaries. He fell specially 
under the influence of Adolphe Pictet, a 
brilliant philologist and man of letters be- 
longing to a well-known Genevese family, 
and in later life he was able, while review- 
ing one of M. Pictet’s books, to give grate- 
ful expression to his sense of obligation. 
Writing in 1856 he describes the effect 
produced in Geneva by M. Pictet’s Lectures 
on Aisthetics in 1840 —the first ever deliv- 
ered in a town in which the Beautiful had 
been for centuries regarded as the rival and 
enemy of the True. ‘He who is now writ- 
ing,’ says Amiel, ‘ was then among M. Pic- 
tet’s youngest hearers. Since then twenty 
experiences of the same kind have followed 
each other in his intellectual experience, 
yet none has effaced the deep impression 
made upon him by these lectures. Coming 
as they did at a favourable moment, and 
answering many a positive question and 


XXVili - AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


many a vague aspiration of youth, they ex- 
ercised a decisive influence over his thought ; 
they. were to him an important step in that 
continuous initiation which we call life, they 
filled him with fresh intuitions, they brought 
near to him the horizons of his dreams. 
And, as always happens with a first-rate 
man, what struck him even more than the 
teaching was the teacher. So that this 
memory of 1840 is still dear and precious 
to him, and for this double service, which 
is not of the kind one forgets, the student 
of those days delights in expressing to the 
professor of 1840 his sincere and filial grat- 
itude.’ ' 

Amiel’s first literary production, or prac- 
tically his first, seems to have been the 
result partly of these lectures, and partly 
of a visit to Italy which began in November 
1841. In 1842, a year which was spent 
entirely in Italy and Sicily, he contributed 
three articles on M. Rio’s book, L’ Art 
Chrétien, to the Bibliothéque Universelle 
de Genéve. We see in them the young 
student conscientiously writing his first 
review — writing it at inordinate length, as 
young reviewers are apt to do, and treat- 
ing the subject ab ovo in a grave, pontifical 

way, which is a little naive and inexperi- 


INTRODUCTION. xxix 


‘enced indeed, but still promising, as all 
seriousness of work and purpose is promis- 
ing. All that is individual in it is first of 
all the strong Christian feeling which much 
of it shows, and secondly, the tone of mel- 
ancholy which already makes itself felt 
here and there, especially in one rather re- 
markable passage. As to the Christian 
feeling, we find M. Rio described as belong- 
ing to ‘that noble school of men. who are 
striving to rekindle the dead beliefs of 
France, to rescue Frenchmen from the camp 
of materialistic or pantheistic ideas, and rally 
them round that Christian banner which is 
‘the banner of true progress and true civilisa- 
tion.’ The Renaissance is treated as a dis- 
-astrous but inevitable crisis, in which the 
idealism of the Middle Ages was dethroned 
by the naturalism of modern times, —‘'The 
Renaissance perhaps robbed us of more than 
it gave us,,— and soon. The tone of criti- 
cism is instructive enough to the student of 
Amiel’s mind, but the product itself has no 
particular savour of its own. The occa- 
sional note of depression and discourage- 
ment, however, is a different thing; here, for 
those who know the Journal Intime, there 
is already something characteristic, some- 
thing which foretells the future... For in- 


xXx AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


stance, after dwelling with evident zest on 
the nature of the metaphysical problems 
lying at the root of art in general, and 
Christian art in particular, the writer goes 
on to set the difficulty of M. Rio’s task 
against its attractiveness, to insist on the 
intricacy of the investigations involved, and 
on the impossibility of making the two 
instruments on which their success depends 
—the imaginative and the analytical fac- 
ulty — work harmoniously and effectively 
together. And supposing the goal achieved, 
supposing a man by insight and patience 
has succeeded in forcing his way farther 
than any previous explorer into the recesses 
of the Beautiful or the True, there still re- 
mains the enormous, the insuperable diffi- 
culty of expression, of ‘fit and adequate 
communication from mind to mind ; there 
still remains the question whether, after all, 
‘he who discovers a new world in the 
depths of the invisible would not do wisely 
to plant on it a flag known to himself alone, 
and, like Achilles, ‘‘devour his heart in 
secret ;’? whether the greatest problems 
which have ever been guessed on earth had 
not better have remained buried in the 
brain which had found the key to them,- 
and whether the deepest thinkers — those 


INTRODUCTION. XXxi 


whose hand has been boldest in drawing 
aside- the veil, and their eye keenest in 
fathoming the mysteries beyond it — had 
not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have 
kept for heaven, and heaven only, secrets 
and mysteries which human tongue cannot 
truly express, nor human intelligence con- 
ceive.’ 

Curious words for a beginner of twenty- 
one! ‘There is a touch, no doubt, of youth 
and fatuity in the passage; one feels how 
much the vague sonorous phrases have 
pleased the writer’s immature literary 
sense; but there is something else too— 
there is a breath of that same speculative 
passion which burns in the Journal, and 
one hears, as it were, the first accents of a 
melancholy, the first expression of a mood 
of mind, which became in after years the 
fixed characteristic of the writer. ‘At 
twenty he was already proud, timid, and 
melancholy,’ writes an old friend; and a 
little farther on, ‘Discouragement took 
possession of him very early.’ 

However, in spite of this inbred tendency, 
which was probably hereditary and inevi- 
table, the years which followed these arti- 
cles, from 1842 to Christmas 1848, were 
years of happiness and steady intellectual 


XXXli AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


expansion. They were Amiel’s Wander- 
jahre, spent in a free, wandering student 
life, which left deep marks on his intellec- 
tual development. During four years, from 
1844 to 1848, his headquarters were at Ber- 
lin; but every vacation saw him exploring 
some new country or fresh intellectual 
centre — Scandinavia in 1845, Holland in 
1846, Vienna, Munich, and Tiibingen in 
1848, while Paris had already attracted him 
in 1841, and he was to make acquaintance 
with London ten years later, in 1851. No 
circumstances could have been more fa- 
vourable, one would have thought, to the 
development of such a nature. With his 
extraordinary power of ‘throwing himself 
into the object’ —of effacing himself and 
his own personality in the presence of the 
thing to be understood and absorbed — he 
must have passed these years of travel and 
acquisition in a state of continuous intellec- 
tual energy and excitement. It is in no 
spirit of conceit that he says in 1857, com- 
paring himself with Maine de Biran, ‘ This 
nature is, as it were, only one of the men 
which exist in me. My horizon is vaster }; 
I have seen much more of men, things, 
countries, peoples, books ; I have a greater 
mass of experiences.’ This fact, indeed, 


INTRODUCTION. XXXiil 


of a wide and varied personal experience, 
must never be forgotten in any critical esti- 
mate of Amiel as a man or writer. We 
may so easily conceive him as a sedentary 
professor, with the ordinary professorial 
knowledge, or rather ignorance, of men and 
the world, falling into introspection under 
the pressure of circumstance, and for want, 
as it were, of something else to think about. 
Not at all. The man who has left us these 
microscopic analyses of his own moods and 
feelings, had penetrated more or less into 
the social and intellectual life of half a 
dozen European countries, and was famil- 
iar not only with the books, but, to a large 
extent also, with the men of his generation. 
The meditative and introspective gift was 
in him, not the product, but the mistress 
of circumstance. It took from the outer 
world what that world had to give, and 
then made the stuff so gained subservient 
to its own ends. 

Of these years of travel, however, the 
four years spent at Berlin were by far the 
most important. ‘It was at Heidelberg and 
Berlin,’ says M. Scherer, ‘that the world 
of science and speculation first opened on 
the dazzled eyes of the young man. He 
was accustomed to speak of his four years 


XXXiV AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


at Berlin as ‘‘ his intellectual phase,’’ and 
one felt that he inclined to regard them as 
the happiest period of his life. The spell 
which Berlin laid upon him lasted long.’ 
Probably his happiness in Germany was 
partly owing to a sense of reaction against 
Geneva. There are signs that he had felt 
himself somewhat isolated at school and 
college, and that in the German world his 
special individuality, with its dreaminess 
and its melancholy, found congenial sur- 
roundings far more readily than had been 
the case in the drier and harsher atmos- 
phere of the Protestant Rome. However 
this may be, it is certain that German 
thought took possession of him, that he be- 
came steeped not only in German methods 
of speculation, but in German modes of 
expression, in German forms of sentiment, 
which clung to him through life, and vitally 
affected both his opinions and his style. 
M. Renan and M. Bourget shake their 
heads over the Germanisms, which, accord- 
ing to the latter, give a certain ‘ barbarous’ 
air to many passages of the Journal. But 
both admit that Amiel’s individuality owes 
a great part of its penetrating force to that 
intermingling of German with French ele- 
ments, of which there are such abundant 


INTRODUCTION. XXXV 


traces in the Journal Intime. Amiel, in 
fact, is one more typical product of a move- 
ment which is certainly of enormous im- 
portance in the history of modern thought, 
even though we may not be prepared to 
assent to all the sweeping terms in which a 
writer like M. Taine describes it. ‘From 
1780 to 1830,’ says M. Taine, ‘Germany 
produced all the ideas of our historical age, 
and during another half-century, perhaps 
another century, notre grande affaire sera 
de les repenser.’ He is inclined to compare 
the influence of German ideas on the mod- 
ern world to the ferment of the Renais- 
sance. No spiritual force ‘more original, 
more universal, more fruitful in conse- 
quences of every sort and bearing, more 
capable of transforming and remaking 
everything presented to it, has arisen dur- 
ing the last three hundred years. Like the 
spirit of the Renaissance and of the clas- 
sical age, it attracts into its orbit all the 
‘great works of contemporary intelligence.’ 
Quinet, pursuing a somewhat different line 
of thought, regards the worship of German 
ideas inaugurated in France by Madame de 
Staél as the natural result of reaction from 
the eighteenth century and all its ways. 
‘German systems, German hypotheses, be- 


XXXxvi AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


liefs, and poetry, all were eagerly welcomed 
as a cure for hearts crushed by the mock- 
ery of Candide and the materialism of the 
Revolution. ... Under the Restoration 
France continued to study German philoso- 
phy and poetry with profound veneration 
and submission. We imitated, translated, 
compiled, and then again we compiled, 
translated, imitated.’ The importance of 
the part played by German influence in 
French Romanticism has indeed been much 
disputed, but the debt of French metaphys- 
ics, French philology, and French histori- 
cal study, to German methods and German 
research during the last half-century is be- 
yond dispute. And the movement to-day 
is as strong as ever. A modern critic like 
M. Darmstetter regards it as a misfortune 
that the artificial stimulus given by the war 
to the study of German has, to some extent, 
checked the study of English in France. 
He thinks that the French have more to 
gain from our literature — taking literature’ 
in its general and popular sense —than 
from German literature. But he raises no 
question as to the inevitable subjection of 
the French to the German mind in matters 
of exact thought and knowledge. ‘To 
study phijology, mythology, history, with- 


._ INTRODUCTION. XXXVii 


out reading German,’ he is as ready to con- 
fess as any one else ‘is to condemn oneself 
to remain in every department twenty 
years behind the progress of science.’ 

Of this great movement, already so pro- 
ductive, Amiel is then a fresh and re- 
markable instance. Having caught from 
the Germans not only their love of exact 
knowledge but also their love of vast hori- 
zons, their insatiable curiosity as to the 
whence and whither of all things, their 
sense of mystery and immensity in the 
universe, he then brings those elements in 
him which belong to his French inheritance 
—and something individual besides, which 
is not French but Genevese —to bear on 
his new acquisitions, and the result is of 
the highest literary interest and value. 
Not that he succeeds altogether in the task 
of fusion. For one who was to write and 
think in French, he was perhaps too long 
in Germany ; he had drunk too deeply of 
German thought; he had been too much 
dazzled by the spectacle of Berlin and its 
imposing intellectual activities. ‘As to his 
literary talent,’ says M. Scherer, after 
dwelling on the rapid growth of his intel- 
lectual powers under German influence, 
‘the profit which Amiel derived from his 


XXXViii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


stay at Berlin is more doubtful. Too long 
contact with the German mind had led to 
the development in him of certain strange- 
nesses of style which he had afterwards to 
get rid of, and even perhaps of some habits 
of thought which he afterwards felt the 
need of checking and correcting.’ This is 
very true. Amiel is no doubt often guilty, 
as M. Caro puts it, of attempts ‘to write 
German in French,’ and there are in his 
thought itself veins of mysticism, elements 
of Schwdarmerei, here and there, of which 
a good deal must be laid to the account of 
his German training. 

M. Renan regrets that after Geneva and 
after Berlin he never came to Paris. Paris, 
he thinks, would have counteracted the He- 
gelian influences brought to bear upon him 
at Berlin,* would have taught him cheerful- 
ness, and taught him also the art of writ- 
ing, not beautiful fragments, but a book. 
Possibly — but how much we should have 
lost! Instead of the Amiel we know, we 
should have had one accomplished French 
critic the more. Instead of the spiritual 
drama of the Journal Intime, some further 

* See a note, however, on the subject of Amiel’s 


philosophical relationships, printed as an Appendix 
to the present volume. 


INTRODUCTION. XXXixX 


additions to French belles lettres; instead 
of something to love, something to ad- 
mire! No, there is no wishing the Ger- 
man element in Amiel away. Its invading, 
troubling effect upon his thought and tem- 
perament goes far to explain the interest 
and suggestiveness of his mental history. 
The language he speaks is the language of 
that French criticism which—we have 
Sainte-Beuve’s authority for it—is best 
described by the motto of Montaigne, ‘ Un 
peu de chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, 
a la frangaise,’ and the thought he tries to 
express in it is thought torn and strained 
by the constant effort to reach the All, the 
totality of things: ‘What I desire is the 
sum of all desires, and what I seek to 
know is the sum of all different kinds of 
knowledge. Always the complete, the ab- 
solute, the teres atgue rotundum.’ And it 
was this antagonism, or rather this fusion 
of traditions in him, which went far to 
make him original, which opened to him, 
that is to say, so many new lights on old 
paths, and stirred in him such capacities of 
fresh and individual expression. 

We have been carried forward, however, 
a little too far by this general discussion of 
Amiel’s debts to Germany. Let us take 


xl AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


up the biographical thread again. In 1848 
his Berlin apprenticeship came to an end, 
and he returned to Geneva. ‘How many 
places, how many impressions, observa- 
tions, thoughts, — how many forms of men 
and things, — have passed before me and in 
me since April 1843,’ he writes in the Jour- 
nal, two or three months after his return. 
‘The last seven years have been the most 
important of my life; they have been the 
novitiate of my intelligence, the initiation 
of my being into being.’ The first literary 
evidence of his matured powers is to be 
found in two extremely interesting papers 
on Berlin, which he contributed to the Bib- 
liothéque Universelle in 1848, apparently 
just before he left Germany. Here for the 
first time we have the Amiel of the Journal 
Intime. The young man who five years 
before had written his painstaking review 
of M. Rio is now in his turn a master. He 
speaks with dignity and authority, he has 
a graphic,*vigorous prose at command, the 
form of expression is condensed and epi- 
grammatic, and there is a mixture of enthu- 
siasm and criticism in his description of the 
powerful intellectual machine then working 
in the Prussian capital which represents a 
permanent note of character, a lasting atti- 


INTRODUCTION. xli 


tude of mind. A great deal, of course, in 
the two papers is technical and statistic, 
but what there is of general comment and 
criticism is so good that one is tempted to 
make some melancholy comparisons be- 
tween them and another article in the Bib- 
liothéque, that on Adolphe Pictet, written in 
1856, and from which we have already 
quoted. In 1848 Amiel was for a while 
master of his powers and his knowledge ; 
no fatal divorce had yet taken place in him 
between the accumulating and producing 
faculties; he writes readily even for the 
public, without labour, without affectations. 
Eight years later the reflective faculty has 
outgrown his control ; composition, which 
represents the practical side of the intel- 
lectual life, has become difficult and painful 
to him, and he has developed what he 
himself calls ‘a wavering manner, born of 
doubt and scruple.’ 

How few could have foreseen the failure 
in public and practical life which lay before 
him at the moment of his reappearance at 
Geneva in 1848! ‘ My first meeting with 
him in 1849 is still vividly present to me,’ 
says M. Scherer. ‘He was twenty-eight, 
and he had just come from Germany laden 
with science, but he wore his knowledge 


xiii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


lightly, his looks were attractive, his con- 
versation animated, and no affectation 
spoilt the favourable impression he made 
on the bystander, —the whole effect, in- 
deed, was of something brilliant and strik- 
ing. In his young alertness Amiel seemed 
to be entering upon life as a conqueror; 
one would have said the future was all his 
own.’ 

His return, moreover, was marked by a 
success which seemed to secure him at 
once an important position in his native 
town. After a public competition he was 
appointed, in 1849, Professor of Aisthetics 
and French Literature at the Academy of 
Geneva, a post which he held for four years, 
exchanging it for the Professorship of Moral 
Philosophy in 1854. Thus at twenty-eight, 
without any struggle to succeed, he had 
gained, it would have seemed, that safe foot- 
hold in life which should be all the philoso- 
pher or the critic wants to secure the full 
and fruitful development of his gifts. Un- 
fortunately the appointment, instead of the 
foundation and support, was to be the stum- 
blingblock of his career. Geneva at the 
time was in a state of social and _ politi- 
cal ferment. After a long struggle, begin- 
ning with the revolutionary outbreak of 


INTRODUCTION. xiii 


November 1841, the Radical party, led by 
James Fazy, had succeeded in ousting the 
Conservatives — that is*to say, the govern- 
ing class, which had ruled the Republic 
since the Restoration—from power. And 
with the advent of the democratic constitu- 
tion of 1846, and the exclusion of the old 
Genevese families from the administration 
they had so long monopolised, a number of 
subsidiary changes were effected, not less im- 
portant to the ultimate success of Radicalism 
than the change in political machinery in-. 
troduced by the new constitution. Among 
them was the disappearance of almost the 
whole existing staff of the Academy, then 
and now the centre of Genevese education, 
and up to 1847 the stronghold of the mod- 
erate ideas of 1814, followed ‘by the ap- 
pointment of new men less likely to hamper 
the Radical order of things. 

Of these new men Amiel was one. He 
had been absent from Geneva during the 
years of conflict which had preceded Fazy’s 
triumph ; he seems to have had no family 
or party connections with the leaders of the 
defeated side, and as M. Scherer points out, 
he could accept a non-political post at the 
hands of the new government, two years 
after the violent measures which had 


xliv AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


marked its accession, without breaking any 
pledges or sacrificing any convictions, But 
none the less the’ step was a fatal one. 
M. Renan is so far in the right. If any 
timely friend had at that moment suc- 
ceeded in tempting Amiel to Paris, as Gui- 
zot tempted Rossi in 1833, there can be little 
question that the young professor’s after 
life would have been happier and saner. 
As it was, Amiel threw himself into the 
competition for the chair, was appointed 
professor, and then found himself in a 
hopelessly false position, placed on the 
threshold of life, in relations and sur- 
roundings for which he was radically un- 
fitted, and cut off by no fault of his own 
from the miliew to which he rightly be- 
longed, and in which his sensitive individ- 
uality might have expanded normally and 
freely. For the defeated upper class very 
naturally shut their doors on the nominees 
of the new régime, and as this class repre- 
sented at that moment almost everything 
that was intellectually distinguished in 
Geneva, as it was the guardian, broadly 
speaking, of the scientific and literary tra- 
ditions of the little State, we can easily 
imagine how galling such a social ostracism 
must have been to the young professor, 


INTRODUCTION. xlv 


accustomed to the stimulating atmosphere, 
the common intellectual interests of Berlin, 
and tormented with perhaps more than the 
ordinary craving of youth for sympathy 
and for affection. In a great city, contain- 
ing within it a number of different circles 
of life, Amiel would easily have found his 
own circle, nor could political discords have 
affected his social comfort to anything like 
the same extent. But in a town not much 
larger than Oxford, and in which the cul- 
tured class had hitherto formed a more or 
less homogeneous and united whole, it was 
almost impossible for Amiel to escape from 
his grievance and establish a sufficient bar- 
rier of friendly interests between himself 
and the society which ignored him. There 
can be no doubt that he suffered, both in 
mind and character, from the struggle the 
‘position involved. He had no natural sym- 
pathy with Radicalism. His taste, which 
was extremely fastidious, his judgment, 
his passionate respect for truth, were all 
offended by the noise, the narrowness, the 
dogmatism of the triumphant. democracy. 
So that there was no making up on the one 
side for what he had lost on the other, and 
he proudly resigned himself to an isolation 
and a reserve which, reinforcing, as they 


xlvi AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


did, certain native weaknesses of character, 
had the most unfortunate effect upon his 
life. 

In a passage of the Journal written 
nearly thirty years after his election he 
allows himself a few pathetic words, haif 
of accusation, half of self-reproach, which 
make us realise how deeply this untoward- 
ness of social circumstance had affected 
him. He is discussing one of Madame de 
Staél’s favourite words, the word considera- 
tion. ‘* What is consideration?’ he asks. 
‘How does a man obtain it? how does it 
differ from fame, esteem, admiration ?’ 
And then he turns upon himself. ‘It is 
curious, but the idea of consideration has 
been to me so little of a motive that I have 
not even been conscious of such an idea. But 
ought I not to have been conscious of it?’ 
he asks himself anxiously, —‘ ought I not 
to have been more careful to win the good 
opinion of others, more determined to con- 
quer their hostility or indifference? It 
would have been a joy to me to be smiled 
upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to 
obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness 
and goodwill. But to hunt down considera- 
tion and reputation —to force the esteem 
of others —seemed to me an effort un 


INTRODUCTION. xlvii 


worthy of myself, almost a degradation. 
A struggle with unfavourable opinion has 
seemed to me beneath me, for all the while 
my heart has been full of sadness and dis- 
appointment, and I have known and felt 
that I have been systematically and deliber- 
ately isolated. Untimely despair and the 
deepest discouragement have been my con- 
stant portion. Incapable of taking any 
interest in my talents for their own sake, I 
let everything slip as soon as the hope of 
being loved for them and by them had for- 
saken me. A hermit against my will, I 
have not even found peace in solitude, 
because my inmost conscience has not been 
any better satisfied than my heart.’ 

Still one may no doubt easily exaggerate 
this loneliness of Amiel’s. His social diffi- 
culties represent rather a dull discomfort 
in his life, which in course of time, and in 
combination with a good many other causes, 
produced certain unfavourable results on his 
temperament and on his public career, than 
anything very tragic and acute. They 
were real, and he, being what he was, was 
specially unfitted to cope with and conquer 
them. But he had his friends, his pleas- 
ures, and even to some extent his successes, 
like other men. ‘He had an elasticity of 


xlviii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


mind,’ says M. Scherer, speaking of him as 
he knew him in youth, ‘ which reacted 
against vexations from without, and his 
cheerfulness was readily restored by con- 
versation and the society of a few kindred 
spirits. We were accustomed, two or three 
friends and I, to walk every Thursday to 
the Saléve, Lamartine’s Saléve aux jflancs 
azurés ; we dined there, and did not return 
till nightfall.’ They were days devoted to 
débauches platoniciennes, to ‘the free ex- 
change of ideas, the free play of fancy and 
of gaiety. Amiel was not one of the origi- 
nal members of these Thursday parties ; 
but whenever he joined us we regarded it 
as a féte-day. In serious discussion he was 
a master of the unexpected, and his energy, 
his entrain, affected us all. If his gram- 
matical questions, his discussions of rhymes 
and synonyms, astonished us at times, how 
often, on the other hand, did he not give us 
cause to admire the variety of his knowl- 
edge, the precision of his ideas, the charm 
of his quick intelligence! We found him 
always, besides, kindly and amiable, a 
nature one might trust and lean upon with 
perfect security. He awakened in us but 
one regret; we could not understand how it 
was a man so richly gifted produced noth- 
ing, or only trivialities.’ 


INTRODUCTION. xlix 


In these last words of M. Scherer’s we 
have come across the determining fact of 
Amiel’s life in its relation to the outer 
world — that ‘sterility of genius,’ of which 
he was the victim. For social ostracism 
and political anxiety would have mattered 
to him comparatively little if he could but 
have lost himself in the fruitful activities of 
thought, in the struggles and the victories 
of composition and creation. A German 
professor of Amiel’s knowledge would have 
wanted nothing beyond his Fach, and nine 
men out of ten in his circumstances would 
have made themselves the slave of a magnum 
opus, and forgotten the vexations of every- 
day life in the ‘douces joies de la science.’ 
But there were certain characteristics in 
Amiel which made it impossible — which 
neutralised his powers, his knowledge, his 
intelligence, and condemned him, so far as 
his public performance was concerned, to 
barrenness and failure. What were these 
characteristics, this element of unsoundness 
and disease, which M. Caro calls ‘la mala- 
die de Vidéal’ ? 

Before we can answer the question we 
must go back a little and try to realise the 
intellectual and moral equipment of the 
young man of twenty-eight, who seemed to 


1 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


M. Scherer to. have the world at his feet. 
What were the chief qualities of mind and 
heart which Amiel brought back with him 
from Berlin? In the first place, an omniv- 
orous desire to know: —‘ Amiel,’ says M. 
Scherer, ‘read everything.’ In the second, 
an extraordinary power of sustained and 
concentrated thought, and a passionate, 
almost a religious, delight in the exercise 
of his power. Knowledge, science, stirred 
in him no mere sense of curiosity or cold 
critical instinct, —‘he came to his desk as 
to an altar.’ ‘A friend who knew him 
well,’ says M. Scherer, ‘remembers having 
heard him speak with deep emotion of that 
lofty serenity of mood which he had expe- 
rienced during his years in Germany when- 
ever, in the early morning before dawn, 
with his reading-lamp beside him, he had 
found himself penetrating once more into 
the region of pure thought, ‘‘ conversing 
with ideas, enjoying the inmost life of 
things.”?’ ‘Thought,’ he says somewhere 
in the Journal, ‘is like opium. It can in- 
toxicate us and yet leave us broad awake.’ 
To this intoxication of thought he seems to 
have been always specially liable, and his 
German experience — unbalanced, as such 
an experience generally is with a young 


INTRODUCTION. li 


man, by family life, or by any healthy 
commonplace interests and pleasures — de- 
veloped the intellectual passion in him to 
an abnormal degree. For four years he 
had devoted himself to the alternate excite- 
ment and satisfaction of this passion. He 
had read enormously, thought enormously, 
and in the absence of any imperative claim 
on the practical side of him, the accumula- 
tive, reflective faculties had grown out of 
_all proportion to the rest of the personality. 
Nor had any special subject the power to 
fix him. Had he been in France, what 
Sainte-Beuve calls the French ‘ imagination 
de détail’ would probably have attracted 
his pliant, responsive nature, and he would 
have found happy occupation in some one 
of the innumerable departments of research 
on which the French have been patiently 
spending their analytical gift since that 
general widening of horizons which accom- : 
panied and gave value to the Romantic 
movement. But instead he was at Berlin, 
in the centre of that speculative ferment 
which followed the death of Hegel and the 
break-up of the Hegelian idea into a num- 
ber of different and conflicting sections of 
philosophical opinion. He was under the 
‘spell of German synthesis, of that tradi- 


lii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


tional, involuntary effort which the German 
mind makes, generation after generation, 
to find the unity of experience, to range its 
accumulations from life and thought under 
a more and more perfect, a more and more 
exhaustive, formula. Not this study or that 
study, not this detail or that, but the whole 
of things, the sum of Knowledge, the Infi- 
nite, the Absolute, alone had value or real- 
ity. In his own words: ‘ There is no repose 
for the mind except in the absolute; for 
feeling except in the infinite ; for the soul 
exceptin the divine. Nothing finite is true, 
is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. 
All that is particular is exclusive, and all 
that is exclusive repels me. There is noth- 
ing non-exclusive but the All; my end is 
communion with Being through the whole 
of Being.’ 

It was not, indeed, that he neglected the 
study of detail; he had a strong natural 
aptitude for it, and his knowledge was wide 
and real ; but detail was ultimately valuable 
to him, not in itself, but as food for a spec- 
ulative hunger, for which, after all, there is 
no real satisfaction. All the pleasant paths 
which traverse the kingdom of Knowledge, 
in which so many of us find shelter and 
life-long means of happiness, led Amiel 


INTRODUCTION. liii 


straight into the wilderness of abstract 
speculation. And the longer he lingered in 
the wilderness, unchecked by any sense of 
intellectual responsibility, and far from the 
sounds of human life, the stranger and the 
weirder grew the hallucinations of thought. 
The Journal gives marvellous expression to 
them: ‘I can find no words for what I feel. 
My consciousness is withdrawn into itself ; 
Ihear my heart beating, and my life pass- 
ing. It seems to me that I have become a 
statue on the banks of the river of time, 
that I am the spectator of some mystery, 
and shall issue from it old, or no longer 
capable of age.’ Or again: ‘I am aspecta- 
tor, so to speak, of the molecular whirl- 
wind which men call individual life; Iam 
conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, 
an irresistible movement of existence, which 
is going on within me — and this phenom- 
enology of myself serves as a window 
opened upon the mystery of the world. I 
am, or rather my sensible consciousness is, 
concentrated upon this ideal standing-point, 
this invisible threshold, as it were, whence 
one hears the impetuous passage of time, 
rushing and foaming as it flows out into the 
changeless ocean of eternity. After all the 
bewildering distractions of life — after hav- 


liv AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


ing drowned myself in a multiplicity of 
trifles and in the caprices of this fugitive 
existence, yet without ever attaining to 
self-intoxication or self-delusion, —I come 
again upon the fathomless abyss, the silent 
and melancholy cavern, where dwell ‘‘ Die 
Miitter,’’ where sleeps that which neither 
lives nor dies, which has neither movement 
nor change, nor extension, nor form, and 
which lasts when all else passes away.’ 
Wonderful sentences | — ‘* Prodiges de la 
pensée speculative, décrits dans une langue 
non moins prodigieuse,’ as M. Scherer says 
of the innumerable passages which describe 
either this intoxication of the infinite, or the 
various forms and consequences of that 
deadening of personality which the abstract 
processes of thought tend to produce. But 
it is easy to understand that a man in whom 
experiences of this kind become habitual is 
likely to lose his hold upon the normal in- 
terests of life. What are politics or litera- 
ture to such a mind but fragments without 
real importance — dwarfed reflections of 
ideal truths for which neither language nor 
institutions provide any adequate expres- 
sion! How is it possible to take seriously 
what is so manifestly relative and tempo- 
rary as the various existing forms of human 


INTRODUCTION. lv 


activity ? Above all, how is it possible 
to take oneself seriously, to spend one’s 
thought on the petty interests of a petty 
individuality, when the beatific vision of 
universal knowledge, of absolute being, has 
once dawned on the dazzled beholder ? 
The charm and the savour of everything 
relative and phenomenal is gone. A man 
may go on talking, teaching, writing — but 
the spring of personal action is broken ; his 
actions are like the actions of a somnambu- 
list. 

No doubt to some extent this mood is 
familiar to all minds endowed with the true 
speculative genius. The philosopher has 
zlways tended to become unfit for practical 
life; his unfitness, indeed, is one of the 
comic motives, so to speak, of literature. 
But a mood which, in the great majority of 
thinkers, is intermittent, and is easily kept 
within bounds by the practical needs, the 
mere physical instincts of life, was in Amiel 
almost constant, and the natural impulse of 
the human animal towards healthy move- 
ment and a normal play of function, never 
very strong in him, was gradually weakened 
and destroyed by an untoward combination 
of circumstance. The low health from 
which he suffered more or less from his 


lvi AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


boyhood, and then the depressing influences 
of the social difficulties we have described, 
made it more and more difficult for the rest 
of the organism to react against the tyranny 
of the brain. And as the normal human 
motives lost their force, what he calls ‘the 
Buddhist tendeney in me’ gathered strength 
year by year, until, like some strange mis- 
growth, it had absorbed the whole energies 
and drained the innermost life-blood of the 
personality which had developed it. And 
the result is another soul’s tragedy, another 
story of conflict and failure, which throws 
fresh light on the mysterious capacities of 
human nature, and warns us, as the letters 
of Obermann in their day warned the gen- 
eration of George Sand, that with the rise 
of new intellectual perceptions new spiritual 
dangers come into being, and that across 
the path of continuous evolution which the 
modern mind is traversing there lies many 
a selva oscura, many a lonely and desolate 
tract, in which loss and pain await it. The 
story of the Journal Intime is a story to 
make us think, to make us anxious; but at 
the same time, in the case of a nature like 
Awtniel’s, there is so much high poetry 
thrown off from the long process of conflict, 
the power of vision and of reproduction 


INTRODUCTION. lvii 


which the intellect gains at the expense of 
the rest of the personality is in many re- 
spects so real and so splendid, and produces 
results so stirring often to the heart and 
imagination of the listener, that in the end 
we put down the record not so much with a 
throb of pity as with an,impulse of grati- 
tude. The individual error and suffering is 
almost forgotten ; all that we can realise is 
the enrichment of human feeling, the quick- 
ened sense of spiritual reality bequeathed 
to us by the baffled and solitary thinker 
whose via dolorosa is before us. 

The manner in which this intellectual 
idiosyncrasy we have been describing gradu- 
ally affected Amiel’s life supplies abundant 
proof of its actuality and sincerity. It ina 
pitiful story. Amiel might have been saved 
from despair by love and marriage, by pa- 
ternity, by strenuous and successful literary 
production ; and this mental habit of his, — 
this tyranny of ideal conceptions, helped by 
the natural accompaniment of such a tyr- 
anny, a critical sense of abnormal acute- 
ness, — stood between him and everything 
healing and restoring. ‘Iam afraid of an 
imperfect, a faulty synthesis, and I linger 
in the provisional, from timidity and from 
loyalty.’ ~- ‘ As soon as a thing attracts me 


Iviii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


I turn away from it; or rather, I cannot 
either be content with the second-best, or 
discover anything which satisfies my aspi- 
ration. The real disgusts me, and I cannot 
find the ideal.’ And so one thing after an- 
other is put away. Family life attracted 
him perpetually. ‘I cannot escape,’ he 
writes, ‘from the ideal of it: A companion 
of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of 
my hopes; within a common worship — 
towards the world outside kindness and 
beneficence ; education to undertake; the 
thousand and one moral relations which 
develop round the first—all these ideas 
intoxicate me sometimes.’ But in vain. 
‘Reality, the present, the irreparable, the 
necessary, repel and even terrify me. I 
have too much imagination, conscience, and 
penetration, and not enough character. 
The life of thought alone seems to me to 
have enough elasticity and immensity, to be 
Sree enough from the irreparable ; practical 
life makes me afraid, I am distrustful of 
myself and of happiness because I know 
myself. The ideal poisons for me all im- 
perfect possession. And I abhor useless 
regrets and repentances.’ 

It is the same, at bottom, with his profes- 
sorial work. He protects the intellectual 


INTRODUCTION. lix 


freedom, as it were, of his students with 
the same jealousy as he protects his own. 
There shall be no oratorical device, no per- 
suading, no cajoling of the mind this way 
or that. ‘A professor is the priest of his 
subject, and should do the honours of it 
gravely and with dignity.’ And so the man 
who in his private Journal is master of an 
eloquence and a poetry, capable of illumi- 
nating the most difficult and abstract of sub- 
jects, becomes in the lecture-room a dry 
compendium of universal knowledge. ‘Led 
by his passion for the whole,’ says M. 
Scherer, ‘ Amiel offered his hearers, not so 
much a series of positive teachings, as an 
index of subjects, a framework — what the 
Germans call a Schematismus. The skele- 
ton was admirably put together, and excel- 
lent of its kind, and lent itself admirably 
to a certain kind of analysis and demon- 
stration ; but it was a skeleton — flesh, body, 
and life were wanting.’ 

So that as a professor he made no mark. 
He was conscientiousness itself in what- 
ever he conceived to be his duty. But with 
all the critical and philosophical power 
which, as we know from the Journal, he 
might have lavished on his teaching, had 
the conditions been other than they were, 


lx AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


the study of literature, and the study of 
philosophy as such, owe him nothing. But 
for the Journal his years of training and 
his years of teaching would have left equally 
little record behind them. ‘ His pupils at 
Geneva,’ writes one who was himself among 
the number,* ‘ never learnt to appreciate him 
at his true worth. Wedid justice no doubt to 
a knowledge as varied as it was wide, to his 
vast stores of reading, to that cosmopolitan- 
ism of the best kind which he had brought 
back with him from his travels; we liked 
him for his indulgence, his kindly wit. But 
I look back without any sense of pleasure 
to his lectures.’ 

Many a student, however, has shrunk 
from the burden and rsks of family life, 
and has found himself incapabie or teach- 
ing effectively what he knows, and has yet 
redeemed all other incapacities in the field 
of literary production, And here indeed 
we come to the strangest feature in Amiel’s 
career — his literary sterility. That he 
possessed literary power of the highest 
order is abundantly proved by the Journal 
Intime. Knowledge, insight, eloquence, 


*M. Alphonse Rivier, now Professor of Irter- 
national Law at the University of Brussels. 


INTRODUCTION. 1xi 


critical power —all were his. And the 
impulse to produce, which is the natural, 
though by no means the invariable, accom- 
paniment of the literary gift, must have 
been fairly strong in him also. For the 
Journal Intime runs to 17,000 folio pages of 
MS., and his half-dozen volumes of poems, 
though the actual quantity is not large, 
represent an amount of labour which would 
have more than carried him through some 
serious piece of critical or philosophical 
work, and so enabled him to content the 
just expectations of his world. He began 
to write early, as is proved by the fact that 
at twenty he was a contributor to the best 
literary periodical which Geneva possessed. 
He was a charming correspondent, and in 
spite of his passion for abstract thought, 
his intellectual interest, at any rate, in all 
the activities of the day — politics, religious 
organisations, literature, art — was of the 
keenest kind. And yet at the time of his 
death all that this fine critic and profound 
thinker had given to the world, after a life 
entirely spent in the pursuit of letters, was, 
in the first place, a few volumes of poems 
which had had no effect except on a small 
number of sympathetic friends ; a few pages 
of pensées intermingled with the poems, and, 


lxii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


as we now know, extracted from the Jour- 
nal; and four or five scattered essays, the 
length of magazine articles, on Mme. de 
Staél, Rousseau, the history of the Academy 
of Geneva, the literature of French-speak- 
ing Switzerland, and so on! And more 
than this, the production, such as it was, 
had been a production born of effort and 
difficulty ; and the labour squandered on 
poetical forms, on metrical experiments 
and intricate problems of translation, as 
well as the occasional affectations of the 
prose style, might well have convinced the 
critical bystander that the mind of which 
these things were the offspring could have 
no real importance, no profitable message, 
for the world. 

The whole Journal Intime is in some 
sense Amiel’s explanation of these facts. 
In it he has made full and bitter confession 
of his weakness, his failure; he has en- 
deavoured, with an acuteness of analysis 
no other hand can rival, to make the rea- 
sons of his failure and isolation clear both 
to himself and others. ‘To love, to dream, 
to feel, to learn, to understand —all these 
are possible to me if only I may be dis- 
pensed from willing—TI have a sort of 
primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of 


INTRODUCTION. 1xiii 


hatred, of all which dissipates the soul and 
makes it dependent on external things and 
aims. The joy of becoming once more con- 
scious of myself, of listening to the passage 
of time and the flow of the universal life, is 
sometimes enough to make me forget every 
desire and to quench in me both the wish 
- to produce and the power to execute.’ It 
is the result of what he himself calls 
‘ Véblouissement de Vinjfini.2 He no sooner 
makes a step towards production, towards 
action and the realisation of himself, than 
a vague sense of peril overtakes him. The 
inner life, with its boundless horizons and 
its indescribable exaltations, seems endan- 
gered. Is he not about to place between 
himself and the forms of speculative truth 
some barrier of sense and matter — to give 
up the real for the apparent, the substance 
for the shadow? One is reminded of 
Clough’s cry under a somewhat similar 
experience : — 

‘Tf this pure solace should desert my mind, 


What were all else? I dare not risk the loss. 
To the old paths, my soul !’ 


And in close combination with the specu- 
lative sense, with the tendency which car- 
ries a man toward the contemplative study 


lxiv AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


of life and nature as a whole, is the critical 
sense — the tendency which, in the realm of 
action and concrete performance, carries , 
him, as Amiel expresses it, ‘droit au dé- 
faut,’ and makes him conscious at once of 
the weak point, the germ of failure in a 
project or an action. It is another aspect 
of the same idiosyncrasy. ‘The point I 
have reached seems to be explained by a 
too restless search for perfection, by the 
abuse of the critical faculty, and by an 
unreasonable distrust of first impulses, first 
thoughts, first words. — Confidence and 
spontaneity of life are drifting out of my 
reach, and this is why I can no longer act.’ 
For abuse of the critical faculty brings with 
it its natural consequences — timidity of 
soul, paralysis of the will, complete self-dis- 
trust. ‘To know is enough for me; expres- 
sion seems to me often a profanity. What 
I lack is character, will, individuality.” — 
‘By what mystery,’ he writes to M. Scherer, 
‘do others expect much from me? whereas 
I feel myself to be incapable of anything 
serious or important.’ Défiance and im- 
puissance are the words constantly on his 
lips. ‘My friends see what I might have 
been ; I see what I am.’ 

And yet the literary instinct remains, 


INTRODUCTION. lxv 


and must in some way be satisfied.’ And 
so he takes refuge in what he himself calls 
scales, exercises, tours de force in verse- 
translation of the most laborious and diffi- 
cult kind, in ingenious vers d’ occasion, in 
metrical experiments and other literary 
trifling, as his friends think it, of the same 
sort. ‘Iam afraid of greatness. I am not 
afraid of ingenuity ; all my published liter- 
ary essays are little else than studies, games, 
exercises, for the purpose of testing myself. 
I play scales, as it were; I run up and 
down my instrument. I train my hand and 
make sure of its capacity and skill. But 
the work itself remains unachieved. Iam 
_ always preparing and never accomplishing, 
and my energy is swallowed up in a kind of 
barren curiosity.’ 

Not that he surrenders himself to the 
nature which is stronger than he all at once. 
His sense of duty rebels, his conscience 
suffers, and he makes resolution after reso- 
lution to shake himself free from the mental 
tradition which had taken such hold upon 
him —to write, to produce, to satisfy his 
friends. In 1861, a year after M. Scherer 
had left Geneva, Amiel wrote to him, de- 
scribing his difficulties and-his discourage- 
ments, and asking, as one may ask an old 


Ixvi AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


friend of one’s youth, for help and counsel. 
M. Scherer, much touched by the appeal, 
answered it plainly and frankly — described 
the feeling of those who knew him as they 
watched his life slipping away unmarked by 
any of the achievements of which his youth 
had given promise, and pointed out various 
literary openings in which, if he were to put 
out his powers, he could not but succeed. 
To begin with, he urged him to join the 
Revue Germanique, then being started by 
Charles Dollfus, Renan, Littré, and others. 
Amiel left the letter for three months un- 
answered, and then wrote a reply which M. 
Scherer probably received with a sigh of 
impatience. For, rightly interpreted, it 
meant that old habits were too strong, and 
that the momentary impulse had died away. 
When, a little later, Les Etrangéres, a col- 
lection of verse-translations, came out, it 
was dedicated to M. Scherer, who did not, 
however, pretend to give it any very cordial 
reception. Amiel took his friend’s coolness 
in very good part, calling him his ‘dear 
Rhadamanthus.’ ‘ How little I knew!’ 
cries M. Scherer. ‘What I regret is to 
have discovered too late by means of the 
Journal, the key to a problem which seemed 
to me hardly serious, and which I now feel 


INTRODUCTION. lxvii 


to have been tragic. A kind of remorse 
seizes me that I was not able to understand 
my friend better, and to soothe his suffer- 
ing by a sympathy which would have been 
a mixture of pity and admiration.’ 

Was it that all the while Amiel felt him- 
self sure of his revanche? that he knew the 
value of all those sheets of Journal which 
were slowly accumulating under his hand ? 
Did he say to himself sometimes: ‘My 
friends are wrong ; my gifts and my knowl- 
edge are not lost; I have given expression 
to them in the only way possible to me, and 
when I die it will be found that I too, like 
other men, have performed the task ap- 
pointed me, and contributed my quota to 
the human store’? It is clear that very 
early he began to regard it as possible that 
portions of the Journal should be published 
after his death, and, as we have seen, he 
left certain ‘literary instructions,’ dated 
seven years before his last illness, in which 
his executors were directed to publish such 
parts of it as might seem to them to possess 
any general interest. But it is clear also 
that the Journal was not, in any sense, 
written for publication. ‘These pages,’ 
say the Geneva editors, ‘ written au courant 
de la plume—sometimes in the morning, 


xviii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


but more often at the end of the day, with. 
out any idea of composition or publicity — 
are marked by the repetition, the lacune, 
the carelessness, inherent in this kind of 
monologue. The thoughts and sentiments 
expressed have no other aim than sincerity 
of rendering.’ 

And his estimate of the value of the 
record thus produced was, in general, a low 
one, especially during the depression and 
discouragement of his later years. ‘This 
Journal of mine,’ he writes in 1876, ‘repre- 
sents the material of a good many volumes ; 
what prodigious waste of time, of thought, 
of strength! It will be useful to nobody, 
and even for myself —it has rather helped 
me to shirk life than to practise it.? And 
again: ‘Is everything I have produced, 
taken together — my correspondence, these 
thousands of Journal pages, my lectures, 
my articles, my poems, my notes of differ- 
ent kinds— anything better than withered 
leaves ? To whom and to what have I been 
useful? Will my name survive me a single 
day, and will it ever mean anything to 
anybody ? A life of no account! When 
allis added up — nothing!’ In passages 
like these there is no anticipation of any 
posthumous triumph over the disapproval 


INTRODUCTION. lxix 


of his friends and the criticism of his 
fellow-citizens. The Journal was a relief, 
the means of satisfying a need of expression 
which otherwise could find no outlet; ‘a 
grief-cheating device,’ but nothing more. 
It did not still the sense of remorse for 
wasted gifts and opportunities which fol- 
lowed poor Amiel through the painful 
months of his last illness. Like Keats, he 
passed away, feeling that all was over, and 
the great game of life lost for ever. 


Tt still remains for us to gather up a few 
facts and impressions of a different kind 
from those which we have been dwelling 
on, which may serve to complete and cor- 
rect the picture we have so far drawn of the 
author of the Journal. For Amiel is full of 
contradictions and surprises, which are in- 
deed one great source of his attractiveness. 
Had he only been the thinker, the critic, 
the idealist we have been describing, he 
would never have touched our feeling as he 
now does ; what makes him so interesting 
is that there was in him a fond of heredity, 
a temperament and disposition, which were 
perpetually reacting against the oppression 
of the intellect and its accumulations. In 
his hours of intellectual concentration he 


Ixx AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


freed himself from all trammels of country 
or society, or even, as he insists, from all 
sense of personality. But at other times 
he was the dutiful son of a country which 
he loved, taking a warm interest in every- 
thing Genevese, especially in everything 
that represented the older life of the town. 
When it was a question of separating the 
Genevese State from the Church, which had 
been the centre of the national life during 
three centuries of honourable history, Amiel 
the philosopher, the cosmopolitan, threw 
himself ardently on to the side of the oppo- 
nents of separation, and rejoiced in their 
victory. A large proportion of his poems 
deal with national subjects. He was one 
of the first members of ‘ L’ Institut Gene- 
vois,’ founded in 1853, and he took a warm 
interest in the movement started by M. 
Eugéne Rambert towards 1870, for the im- 
provement of secondary education through- 
out French-speaking Switzerland. One of 
his friends dwells with emphasis on his 
‘sens profond des nationalités, des langues, 
des villes,’ — on his love for local character- 
istics, for everything deep-rooted in the 
past, and helping to sustain the present. 
He is convinced that no State can live and 
thrive without a certain number of national 


INTRODUCTION. Ixxi 


prejudices, without a@ priori beliefs and tra- 
ditions. It pleases him to see that there is 
a force in the Genevese nationality which 
resists the levelling influences of a crude 
radicalism ; it rejoices him that Geneva ‘has 
not yet become a mere copy of anything, 
and that she is still capable of deciding for 
herself. Those who say to her, “Do as 
they do at New York, at Paris, at Rome, at 
Berlin,”’ are stillin the minority. The doc- 
trinaires who would split her up and de- 
stroy her unity waste their breath upon her. 
She divines the snare laid for her, and 
turns away. I like this proof of vitality.’ 

His love of travelling never left him. 
Paris attracted him, as it attracts all who 
cling to letters, and he gained at one time 
or another a certain amount of acquaint- 
ance with French literary men. In 1852 we 
find him for a time brought into contact 
with Thierry, Lamennais, Béranger, Mignet, 
etc., as well as with Romantics like Alfred 
de Vigny and Théophile Gautier. There 
are poems addressed to De Vigny and Gau- 
tier in his first published volume of 1854. 
He revisited Italy and his old haunts and 
friends in Germany more than once, and in 
general kept the current of his life fresh 
and vigorous by his openness to impressions 
and additions from without 


lxxii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


He was, as we have said, a delightful cor- 
respondent, ‘taking pains with the smallest 
note,’ and within a small circle of friends 
much liked, His was not a nature to be 
generally appreciated at its true value; the 
motives which governed his life were too 
remote from the ordinary motives of human 
conduct, and his characteristics just those 
which have always excited the distrust, if 
not the scorn, of the more practical and 
vigorous order of minds. Probably, too— 
especially in his later years—there was a 
certain amount of self-consciousness and 
artificiality in his attitude towards the 
outer world, which was the result partly 
of the social difficulties we have described, 
partly of his own sense of difference from 
his surroundings, and partly again of that 
timidity of nature, that self-distrust, which 
is revealed to us in the Journal. So that he 
was by no means generally popular, and 
the great success of the Journal is still a 
mystery to the majority of those who knew 
him merely as a fellow-citizen and acquaint- 
ance. But his friends loved him and be- 
lieved in him, and the reserved student, 
whose manners were thought affected in 
general society, could and did make him- 
self delightful to those who understood him, 


INTRODUCTION. Ixxiii 


or those who looked to him for affection. 
‘According to my remembrance of him,’ 
writes M. Scherer, ‘ he was bright, sociable, 
acharming companion. Others who knew 
him better and longer than I say the same. 
The mobility of his disposition counteracted 
his tendency to exaggerations of feeling. 
In spite of his fits of melancholy, his natu- 
ral turn of mind was cheerful; up to the 
end he was young, a child even, amused by 
mere nothings; and whoever had heard 
him laugh his hearty student’s laugh would 
have found it difficult to identify him with 
the author of so many sombre pages.’ M. 
Rivier, his old pupil, remembers him as 
‘strong and active, still handsome, delight- 
ful in conversation, ready to amuse and be 
amused.’ Indeed, if the photographs of 
him are to be trusted, there must have been 
something specially attractive in the sensi- 
tive, expressive face, with its lofty brow, 
fine eyes, and kindly mouth. It is the face 
of a poet rather than of a student, and 
makes one understand certain other little 
points which his friends lay stress on, — for 
instance, his love for and popularity with 
children. 

In his poenis, or at any rate in the earlier 
ones, this lighter side finds more expres- 


Ixxiv AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


sion, proportionally, than in the Journal. 
In the volume called Grains de Mil, pub- 
lished in 1854, and containing verse written 
between the ages of eighteen and thirty, 
there are poems addressed, now to his 
sister, now to old Genevese friends, and 
now to famous men of other countries 
whom he had seen and made friends with 
in passing, which, read side by side with 
the Journal Intime, bring a certain gleam 
and sparkle into an otherwise sombre pic- 
ture. Amiel was never a master of poetical 
form ; his verse, compared to his prose, is 
tame and fettered: it never reaches the 
glow and splendour of expression which 
mark the finest passages of the Journal. It 
has ability, thought— beauty even, of a 
certain kind, but no plastic power, none of 
the incommunicable magic which a George 
Eliot seeks for in vain, while it comes un- 
asked, to deck with imperishable charm the 
commonplace metaphysic and the simpler 
emotions of a Tennyson or a Burns. Still, 
as Amiel’s work, his poetry has an interest 
for those who are interested in him. Sin- 
cerity is written in every line of it. Most 
of the thoughts and experiences with which 
one grows familiar in the Journal are re- 
peated in it; the same joys, the same as- 


= INTRODUCTION. lxxv 
pirations, the same sorrows are visible 
throughout it, so that in reading it one is 
more and more impressed with the force 
and reality of the inner life which has left 
behind it so definite an image of itself. 
And every now and then the poems add a 
detail, a new impression, which seems by 
contrast to give fresh value to the fine-spun 
speculations, the lofty despairs, of the 
Journal. Take these verses, written at 
twenty-one, to his younger sister — ° 


*Treize ans! et sur ton front aucun baiser de 
mére 
Ne viendra, pauvre enfant, invoquer le bon- 
heur ; 
Treize ans! et dans ce jour nul regard de ton 
pere . 
Ne fera d’allégresse épanouir ton coeur. 


* Orpheline, c’est la le nom dont tu t’appelles, 
Oiseau né dans un nid que la foudre a brisé; 
De la couvée, hélas! seuls, trois petits, sans 

ailes 
Furent lancés au vent, loin du reste écrasé. 


‘Et, semés par l’éclair sur les monts, dans les 
plaines, 
Un méme toit encor n’a pu les abriter, 
Et du foyer natal, malgré leurs plaintes 
vaines 
Dieu, peut-étre longtemps, voudra les écarter. 


Ixxvi AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


‘Pourtant console-toi! pense, dans tes 


alarmes, 

Qu’un double bien te reste, espoir et souve- 
nir; 

Une main dans le ciel pour essuyer tes 
larmes; 


Une main ici-bas, enfant, pour te bénir.’ 


The last stanza is especially poor, and in 
none of them is there much poetical prom- 
ise. But the pathetic image of a forlorn 
and orphaned childhood, ‘un nid que la 
foudre a brisé,’ which it calls up, and the 
tone of brotherly affection, linger in one’s 
memory. And through much of the volume 
of 1863, in the verses to ‘ My Godson,’ or 
in the charming poem to Loulou, the little 
girl who at five years old, daisy in hand, 
had sworn him eternal friendship over 
Gretchen’s game of ‘ Er liebt mich —liebt 
mich nicht,’ one hears the same tender 
note. 

‘ Merci, prophétique fleurette, 
Corolle & l’oracle vainqueur, 
Car voila trois ans, paquerette, 
Que tu m’ouvris un petit coeur. 


‘ Et depuis trois hivers, ma belle, 
L’enfant aux grands yeux de velours 
Maintient son petit coeur fidéle, 
Fidéle comme aux premiers jours.’ 


INTRODUCTION. Ixxvii 


His last poetical volume, Jour @ Jour, 
published in 1880, is far more uniformly 
melancholy and didactic in tone than the 
two earlier collections from which we have 
been quoting. But though the dominant 
note is one of pain and austerity, of philos- 
ophy touched with emotion, and the gen- 
eral tone more purely introspective, there 
are many traces in it of the younger Amiel, 
dear, for very ordinary human reasons, to 
his sisters and his friends. And, in gen- 
eral, the pathetic interest of the book for 
all whose sympathy answers to what George 
Sand calls ‘les tragédies que la pensée aper- 
coit et que Veil ne voit point,’ is very great. 
Amiel published it a year before his death, 
and the struggle with failing power which 
the Journal reveals to us in its saddest and 
most intimate reality, is here expressed in 
more reserved and measured form. Faith, 
doubt, submission, tenderness of feeling, 
infinite aspiration, moral passion, that 
straining hope of something beyond, which 
is the life of the religious soul — they are 
all here, and the Dernier Mot with which 
_ the sad little volume ends is poor Amiel’s 
epitaph on himself, his conscious farewell 
to that more public aspect of his life in 
which he had suffered much and achieved 
comparatively so little. 


Ixxviii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


‘Nous avons & plaisir compliqué le bonheur, 
Et par un idéal frivole et suborneur 
Attaché nos ceeurs a la terre; 
Dupes des faux dehors tenus pour l’important, 
Mille choses pour nous ont du prix ... et 
pourtant 
Une seule était nécessaire. 


‘ Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, tra- 
vaux; 
Cependant, au milieu des succés, des bravos 
En nous quelque chose soupire; 
Multipliant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis, 
Nous voudrions nous faire une foule d’amis... 
Pourtant un seul pouvait suffire. 


‘ Victime des désirs, esclave des regrets, 
L’homme s’agite, et s’use, et vieillit sans 
progrés 
Sur sa toile de Pénélope; 
Comme en sage mourant, puissions-nous dire 
en paix 
“J’ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je me 
trompais; 
Tout est bien, mon Dieu m’enveloppe.’’’ 


Upon the small remains of Amiel’s prose 
outside the Journal there is no occasion to 
dwell. The two essays on Madame de Staél 
and Rousseau contain much fine critical 
remark, and might find a place perhaps as 
an appendix to some future edition of the 


INTRODUCTION. lxxix 


Journal; and some of the Pensées, pub- 
lished in the latter half of the volume con- 
taining the Grains de Mil, are worthy of 
preservation. But in general, whatever he 
himself published was inferior to what 
might justly have been expected of him, 
and no one was more conscious of the fact 
than himself. 

The story of his fatal illness, of the 
weary struggle for health which filled the 
last seven years of his life, is abundantly 
told in the Journal — we must not repeat it 
here. He had never been a strong man, 
and at fifty-three he received, at his doc- 
tor’s hands, his arrét de mort. We are told 
that what killed him was ‘heart disease, 
complicated by disease of the larynx,’ and 
that he suffered ‘much and long.’ He was 
buried in the cemetery of Clarens, not far 
from his great contemporary Alexandre 
Vinet; and the affection of a sculptor 
friend provided the monument which now 
marks his resting-place. 


We have thus exhausted all the biograph- 
ical material which is at present available 
for the description of Amiel’s life and rela- 
tions towards the outside world. It is to 
be hoped that the friends to whom the 


Ixxx AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


charge of his memory has been specially 
committed may see their way in the future, 
if not to a formal biography, which is very 
likely better left unattempted, at least to a 
volume of Letters, which would complete 
the Journal Intime, as Joubert’s Corre- 
spondance completes the Pensées. There 
must be ample material for it; and Amiel’s 
letters would probably supply us with more 
of that literary and critical reflection which 
his mind produced so freely and so well, as 
long as there was no question of publica- 
tion, but which is at present somewhat 
overweighted in the Journal Intime. 

But whether biography or correspondence 
is ever forthcoming or not, the Journal 
remains — and the Journal is the important 
matter. We shall read the Letters if they 
appear, as we now read the Poems, for the 
Journal’s sake. ‘The man himself, as poet, 
teacher, and Jittérateur, produced no appre- 
ciable effect on his generation; but the 
posthumous record of his inner life has 
stirred the hearts of readers all over Eu- 
rope, and won him a niche in the House of 
Fame. What are the reasons for this 
striking transformation of a man’s position 
—a transformation which, as M. Scherer 
says, will rank among the curiosities of 


INTRODUCTION. lxxxi 


literary history? In other words, what has 
given the Journal Intime its sudden and 
unexpected success ? 

In the first place, no doubt, its poetical 
quality, its beauty of manner — that fine 
literary expression in which Amiel has 
been able to clothe the subtler processes of 
thought, no less than the secrets of relig- 
ious feeling, or the aspects of natural scen- 
ery. Style is what gives value and currency 
to thought, and Amiel, in spite of all his 
Germanisms, has style of the best kind. 
He possesses in prose that indispensable 
magic which he lacks in poetry. His style, 
indeed, is by no means always in harmony 
with the central French tradition. Proba- 
bly a Frenchman will be inclined to apply 
Sainte-Beuve’s remarks on Amiel’s elder 
countryman, Rodolphe Topffer, to Amiel 
himself : —‘C’ est ainsi qu’on écrit dans les 
littératures qui n’ont point de capitale, de 
quartier général classique, ou d’ Académie ; 
cest ainsi qu'un Allemand, qu'un Améri- 
cain, ou méme un Anglais, use & son gré de 
sa langue. En France au contraire, ou il 
y a une Académie Francaise . . . on 
doit trouver qu'un tel style est une trés- 
grande nouveauté et le succés qu'il a obtenu 
un evénement: tl a fallu bien des circon- 


Ixxxii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


stances pour y préparer.’ No doubt the 
preparatory circumstance in Amiel’s case 
has been just that Germanisation of the 
French mind on which M. Taine and M. 
Bourget dwell with so much emphasis. 
But, be this as it may, there is no mistaking 
the enthusiasm with which some of the best 
living writers of French have hailed these 
pages —instinct, as one declares, ‘ with a 
strange and marvellous poetry;’ full of 
phrases ‘ d’ une intense suggestion de beauté,’ 
according to another. Not that the whole 
of the Journal flows with the same ease, 
‘the same felicity. There are a certain 
number of passages where Amiel ceases to be 
the writer, and becomes the technical philos- 
opher ; there are others, though not many, 
into which a certain German heaviness and 
diffuseness has crept, dulling the edge of 
the sentences, and retarding the develop- 
ment of the thought. When all deductions 
have been made, however, Amiel’s claim is 
still first and foremost, the claim of the 
poet and the artist; of the man whose 
thought uses at will the harmonies and 
resources of speech, and who has attained, 
in words of his own, ‘to the full and mas. 
terly expression of himself.’ 

Then to the poetical beauty of manner 


INTRODUCTION. Ixxxiii — 


which first helped the book to penetrate, 
faire sa trouée, as the French say, we must 
add its extraordinary psychological interest. 
Both as poet and as psychologist, Amiel 
makes another link in a special tradition ; 
he adds another name to the list of those 
who have won a hearing from their fellows 
as interpreters of the inner life, as the 
revealers of man to himself. He is the 
successor of St. Augustine and Dante; he 
is the brother of Obermann and Maurice 
de Guérin. What others have done for the 
spiritual life of other generations he has 
done for the spiritual life of this, and the 
wealth of poetical, scientific, and psycho- 
logical faculty which he has brought to the 
analysis of human feeling and human per- 
ceptions places him —so far as the present 
century is concerned —at the head of the 
small and delicately-gifted class to which 
he belongs. For beside his spiritual experi- 
ence Obermann’s is superficial, and Maurice 
de Guérin’s a passing trouble, a mere quick 
outburst of passionate feeling. Amiel in- 
deed has neither the continuous romantic 
beauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of 
Senancour. The Dent de Midi, with its 
untrodden solitude, its primeval silences 
and its hovering eagles, the Swiss landscape 


{XXXiV AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


described in the ‘Fragment on the Ranz 
de Vaches,’ the summer moonlight on the 
Lake of Neufchatel, — these various pictures 
are the work of one of the most finished 
artists in words that literature has pro- 
duced. But how true George Sand’s criti- 
cism is! ‘Chez Obermann la sensibilité 
est active, Vintelligence est paresseuse ou 
insufisante. He has a certain antique 
power of making the truisms of life splen- 
did and impressive. No one can write 
more poetical exercises than he on the old 
text of pulvis et umbra sumus, but beyond 
this his philosophical power fails him. As 
soon as he leaves the region of romantic 
description how wearisome the pages are 
apt to grow! Instead of a poet, ‘wn ergo- 
teur Voltairien ;’ instead of the explorer 
of fresh secrets of the heart, a Parisian 
talking a cheap cynicism! Intellectually, 
the ground gives way ; there is no solidity 
of knowledge, no range of thought. Above 
all, the scientific idea in our sense is almost 
absent; so that while Amiel represents the 
modern mind at its keenest and best, deal- 
ing at will with the vast additions to knowl- 
edge which the last fifty years have brought 
forth, Senancour is still in the eighteenth- 
century stage, talking like Rousseau of a 


INTRODUCTION. Ixxxv 


return to primitive manners, and discussing 
Christianity in the tone of the Encyclopédie. 

Maurice de Guérin, again, is the inventor 
of new terms in the language of feeling, a 
poet as Amiel and Senancour are. His love 
of nature, the earth-passion which breathes 
in his letters and journal, has a strange 
savour, a force and flame which is all his 
own. Beside his actual sense of community 
with the visible world, Amiel’s love of land- 
scape has a tame, didactic air. The Swiss 
thinker is too ready to make nature a mere 
vehicle of moral or philosophical thought: 
Maurice de Guérin loves her for herself 
alone, and has found words to describe her 
influence over him of extraordinary individ- 
uality and power. But for the rest the story 
of his inner life has but small value in the 
history of thought. His difficulties do not 
go deep enough; his struggle is intellectu- 
ally not serious enough — we see in it only 
a common incident of modern experience 
poetically told; it throws no light on the 
genesis and progress of the great forces 
which are moulding and renovating the 
thought of the present —it tells us nothing 
for the future. 

No, —there is much more in the Journal 
Intime than the imagination or the poetical 


Ixxxvi AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


glow which Amiel shares with his immedi- 
ate predecessors in the art of confession- 
writing. His book is representative of 
human experience in its more intimate and 
personal forms to an extent hardly equalled 
since Rousseau. For his study of himself 
is only a means to an end. ‘ What inter- 
ests me in myself,’ he declares, ‘is that I 
find in my own case a genuine example of 
human nature, and therefore a specimen of 
general value.’ It is the human conscious- 
ness of to-day, of the modern world, in its 
twofold relation —its relation towards the 
infinite and the unknowable, and its rela- 
tion towards the visible universe which con- 
ditions it — which is the real subject of the 
Journal Intime. There are few elements 
of our present life which, in a greater or 
less degree, are not made vocal in these 
pages. Amiel’s intellectual interest is un- 
tiring. Philosophy, science, letters, art, — 
he has penetrated the spirit of them all; 
there is nothing, or almost nothing, within 
the wide range of modern activities which 
he has not at one time or other felt the 
attraction of, and learnt in some sense to 
understand. ‘ Amiel,’ says M. Renan, ‘has 
his defects, but he was certainly one of the 
strongest speculative heads who, during the 


INTRODUCTION. Ixxxvii 


period from 1845 to 1880, have reflected on 
the nature of things.’ And, although a 
certain fatal spiritual weakness debarred 
him to a great extent from the world of 
practical life, his sympathy with action, 
whether it was the action of the politician 
or the social reformer, or merely that 
steady half-conscious performance of its 
daily duty which keeps humanity sweet 
and living, was unfailing. His horizon was 
not bounded by his own ‘ prison-cell,’ or by 
that dream-world which he has described 
with so much subtle beauty; rather the 
energies which should have found their 
natural expression in literary or family life, 
pent up within the mind itself, excited in it 
a perpetual eagerness for intellectual dis- 
covery, and new powers of sympathy with 
whatever crossed its field of vision. 

So that the thinker, the historian, the 
critic, will find himself at home with Amiel. 
The power of organising his thought, the 
art of writing a book, monumentum aere 
perennius, was indeed denied him —he la- 
ments it bitterly ; but, on the other hand, 
he is receptivity itself, responsive to all the 
great forces which move the time, catching 
and reflecting on the mobile mirror of his 
mind whatever winds are blowing from the 
hills of thought. 


Ixxxviii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


And if the thinker is at home with him, 
so too are the religious minds, the natures 
for whom God and duty are the foundation 
of existence. Here, indeed, we come to 
the innermost secret of Amiel’s charm, the 
fact which probably goes farther than any 
other to explain his fascination for a large 
and growing class of readers. For, while 
he represents all the intellectual complexi- 
ties of a time bewildered by the range 
and number of its own acquisitions, the 
religious instinct in him is as strong and 
tenacious as in any of the representative 
exponents of the life of faith. The intel- 
lect is clear and unwavering ; but the heart 
clings to old traditions, and steadies itself 
on the rock of duty. His Calvinistic train- 
ing lingers long in him ; and what detaches 
him from the Hegelian school, with which he 
has much in common, is his own stronger 
sense of personal need, his preoccupation 
with the idea of ‘sin.’ ‘He speaks,’ says 
M. Renan contemptuously, ‘of sin, of sal- 
vation, of redemption, and conversion, as 
if these things were realities. He asks me 
‘*What does M. Renan make of sin?” 
Eh bien, je crois que je le supprime. But 
it is just because Amiel is profoundly sen- 
sitive to the problems of evil and responsi- 


INTRODUCTION. Ixxxix 


bility, and M. Renan dismisses them with 
this half-tolerant, half-sceptical smile, that 
M. Renan’s Souvenirs inform and entertain 
us, while the Journal Intime makes a deep 
impression on that moral sense which is at 
the root of individual and national life. 
The Journal is full, indeed, of this note 
of personal religion. Religion, Amiel de- 
clares again and again, cannot be replaced 
by philosophy. The redemption of the in- 
telligence is not the redemption of the 
heart. The philosopher and critic may 
succeed in demonstrating that the various 
definite forms into which the religious 
thought of man has thrown itself through- 
out history are not absolute truth, but only 
the temporary creations of a need which 
gradually and surely outgrows them all. 
‘The Trinity, the life to come, paradise 
and hell, may cease to be dogmas and spir- 
itual realities, the form and the letter may 
vanish away—the question of human- 
ity remains: What is it which saves?’ 
Amiel’s answer to the question will recall 
to a wide English circle the method and 
spirit of an English teacher, whose dear 
memory lives to-day in many a heart, and 
is guiding many an effort in the cause of 
good, —the method and spirit of the late 


xc AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Professor Green of Balliol. In many re- 
spects there was a gulf of difference between 
the two men. The one had all the will and 
force of personality which the other lacked. 
But the ultimate creed of both, the way in 
which both interpret the facts of nature 
and consciousness, is practically the same. 
In Amiel’s case, we have to gather it 
through all the variations and inevitable 
contradictions of a Journal which is the 
reflection of a life, not the systematic ex- 
pression of a series of ideas, but the main 
results are clear enough. Man is saved by 
love and duty, and by the hope which 
springs from duty, or rather from the moral 
facts of consciousness, as a flower springs 
from the soil. Conscience and the moral 
progress of the race, — these are his points 
of departure. Faith in the reality of the 
moral law is what he clings to when his 
inherited creed has yielded to the pressure 
of the intellect, and after all the storms of 
pessimism and necessitarianism have passed 
over him. The reconciliation of the two 
certitudes, the two methods, the scientific 
and the religious, ‘is to be sought for in 
that moral law which is also a fact, and 
every step of which requires for its ex- 
planation another cosmos than the cosmos 


INTRODUCTION. xcl 


of necessity.” ‘Nature is the virtuality of 
mind, the soul the fruit of life, and liberty 
the flower of necessity.’ Consciousness is 
the one fixed point in this boundless and 
bottomless gulf of things, and the soul’s 
inward law, as it has been painfully elabo- 
rated by human history, the only revelation 
of God. 

The only but the sufficient revelation! 
For this first article of a reasonable creed 
is the key to all else —the clue which leads 
the mind safely through the labyrinth of 
doubt into the presence of the Eternal. 
Without attempting to define the indefin- 
able, the soul rises from the belief in the 
reality of love and duty to the belief in ‘a 
holy will at the root of nature and destiny’ 
—for ‘if man is capable of conceiving 
goodness, the general principle of things, 
which cannot be inferior to man, must be 
_ good.’ And then the religious conscious- 
ness seizes on this intellectual deduction, 
and clothes it in language of the heart, in 
the tender and beautiful language of faith. 
‘There is but one thing needful — to possess 
God. All our senses, all our powers of 
mind and soul, are so many ways of ap- 
proaching the Divine, so many modes of 
tasting and adoring God. Religion is not 


xcii AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


a method: it is a life—a higher and 
supernatural life, mystical in its root and 
practical in its fruits; a communion with 
God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love 
which radiates, a force which acts, a happi- 
ness which overflows.’ And the faith of 
his youth and his maturity bears the shock 
of suffering, and supports him through his 
last hours. He writes a few months before 
the end: ‘The animal expires; man sur- 
renders his soul to the author of the 
soul.’ ... ‘We dream alone, we suffer 
alone, we die alone, we inhabit the last 
resting-place alone. But there is nothing 
to prevent us from opening our solitude to 
God. And so what was an austere mono- 
logue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes 
docility, renunciation passes into peace, and 
the sense of painful defeat is lost in the 
sense of recovered liberty’ —‘ Tout est 
bien, mon Dieu m’ enveloppe.’ 

Nor is this all. It isnot only that Amiel’s 
inmost thought and affections are stayed on 
this conception of ‘a holy will at the root 
of nature and destiny,’ —in a certain very 
real sense he is a Christian. No one is 
more sensitive than he to the contribution 
which Christianity has made to the religious 
wealth of mankind ; no one more penetrated 


INTRODUCTION. XCiii 


than he with the truth of its essential 
doctrine ‘death unto sin and a new birth 
unto righteousness.’ ‘The religion of sin, 
of repentance and reconciliation,’ he cries, 
‘the religion of the new birth and of eternal 
life, is not a religion to be ashamed of.’ 
The world has found inspiration and guid- 
ance for eighteen centuries in the religious 
consciousness of Jesus. ‘The Gospel has 
modified the world and consoled mankind,’ 
and so ‘we may hold aloof from the 
churches and yet bow ourselves before 
Jesus. We may be suspicious of the clergy 
and refuse to have anything to do with 
catechisms, and yet love the Holy and the 
Just who came to save and not to curse.’ 
And in fact Amiel’s whole life and thought 
are steeped in Christianity. He is the 
spiritual descendant of one of the intensest 
and most individual forms of Christian 
belief, and traces of his religious ancestry 
are visible in him at every step. Prot- 
estantism of the sincerer and nobler kind 
leaves an indelible impression on the nature 
which has once surrendered itself to the 
austere and penetrating influences flowing 
from the religion of sin and grace ; and so 
far as feeling and temperament are con- 
cerned, Amiel retained throughout his life 
the marks of Calvinism and Geneva. 


xCciv AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


And yet how clear the intellect remains, 
through all the anxieties of thought, and in 
the face of the soul’s dearest nemories and 
most passionate needs! Amiel, as soon as 
his reasoning faculty has once reached its 
maturity, never deceives himself as to the 
special claims of the religion which by 
instinct and inheritance he loves; he makes 
no compromise with dogma or with miracle. 
Beyond the religions of the present he sees 
always the essential religion, which lasts 
when all local forms and marvels have 
passed away; and as years go on, with 
more and more clearness of conviction, he 
learns to regard all special beliefs and 
systems as ‘prejudices, useful in practice, 
but still narrownesses of the mind ;’ mis- 
growths of thought, necessary in their time 
and place, but still of no absolute value, 
and having no final claim on the thought of 
man. 

And it is just here—in this mixture of 
the faith which clings and aspires, with the 
intellectual pliancy which allows the mind 
to sway freely under the pressure of life 
and experience, and the deep respect for 
truth, which will allow nothing to interfere 
between thought and its appointed tasks — 
that Amiel’s special claim upon us lies. 


INTRODUCTION. XCV 


It is this balance of forces in him which 
makes him so widely representative of the 
modern mind—of its doubts, its convic- 
tions, its hopes. He speaks for the life of 
to-day as no other single voice has yet 
spoken for it; in his contradictions, his 
fears, his despairs, and yet in the constant 
straining towards the unseen and the ideal 
which gives a fundamental unity to his 
inner life, he is the type of a generation 
universally touched with doubt, and yet as 
sensitive to the need of faith as any that 
have gone before it ; more widely conscious 
than its predecessors of the limitations of 
the human mind, and of the iron pressure 
of man’s physical environment ; but at the 
same time—paradox as it may seem— 
more conscious of man’s greatness, more 
deeply thrilled by the spectacle of the 
nobility and beauty interwoven with the 
universe. 

And he plays this part of his so modestly, 
with so much hesitation, so much doubt 
of his thought and of himself! He is no 
preacher, like Emerson and Carlyle, with 
whom, as poet and idealist, he has so much 
in common ; there is little resemblance be- 
tween him and the men who speak, as it 
were, from a height to the crowd beneath, 


xcvi AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


sure always of themselves and what they 
have to say. And here again he represents 
the present and foreshadows the future. 
For the age of the preachers is passing ; 
those who speak with authority on the rid- 
dles of life and nature as the priests of this 
or that all-explaining dogma, are becoming 
less important as knowledge spreads, and 
the complexity of experience is made evi- 
dent to a wider range of minds. The force 
of things is against the certain people. 
Again and again truth escapes from the 
prisons made for her by mortal hands, and 
as humanity carries on the endless pursuit 
she will pay more and more respectful heed 
to voices like this voice of the lonely Gene- 
vese thinker — with its pathetic alternations 
of hope and fear, and the moral steadfast- 
ness which is the inmost note of it —to 
these meditative lives, which, through all 
the ebb and flow of thought, and in the dim 
ways of doubt and suffering, rich in knowl- 
edge, and yet rich in faith, grasp in new 
forms, and proclaim to us in new words, 


‘The mighty hopes which make us men.’ 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


VOL. I. 


[Where no other name is mentioned, Geneva is to 
be understood as the author’s place of residence. ] 


ERLIN, 16th July 1848.—There is but 

one thing needful—to possess God. All 

our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, 
- all our external resources, are so many ways 
of approaching the Divinity, so many modes 
of tasting and of adoring God. We must 
learn to detach ourselves from all that is 
capable of being lost, to bind ourselves ab- 
solutely only to what is absolute and eternal, 
and to enjoy the rest as a loan, a usufruct. 
. . . To adore, to understand, to receive, 
to feel, to give, to act: there is my law, my 
duty, my happiness,my heaven. Let come 
what come will—even death. Only be at 
peace with self, live in the presence of God, 
in communion with Him, and leave the 
guidance of existence to those universal 
powers against whom thou canst do noth- 

I 


2 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


! 


ing !—If death gives me time, so much the 
better. If its summons is near, so much 
the better still; if a half-death overtake 
me, still so much the better, for so the path 
of success is closed to me only that I may 
find opening before me the path of heroism, 
of moral greatness and resignation. Every 
life has its potentiality of greatness, and as 
it is impossible to be outside God, the best, 
is consciously to dwell in Him. 


BeERt In, 20th July 1848. —It gives liberty 
and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our 
own epoch from the point of view of univer- 
sal history, history from the point of view 
of geological periods, geology from the 
point of view of astronomy. When the 
duration of a man’s life or of a people’s life 
appears to us as microscopic as that of a 
fly, and inversely, the life of a gnat as infi- 
nite as that of a celestial body, with all its 
dust of nations, we feel ourselves at once 
very small and very great, and we are able, 
as it were, to survey from the height of the 
spheres our own existence, and the little 
whirlwinds which agitate our little Europe. 

At bottom there is but one subject of 
study: the forms and metamorphoses of 
mind. All other subjects may be reduced 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 3 


to that; all other studies bring us back to 
this study. 


Geneva, 20th April 1849.—It is six 
years! to-day since I last left Geneva. 
How many journeys, how many impres- 
sions, observations, thoughts, how many 
forms of men and things, have since then 
passed before me and in me! The last 
seven years have been the most important 
of my life: they have been the novitiate of 
my intelligence, the initiation of my being 
into being. 

Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor 
blossoming plum-trees and _ peach-trees ! 
What a difference from six years ago, when 
the cherry-trees, adorned in their green 
spring dress and laden with their bridal 
flowers, smiled at my departure along the 
Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy 
threw great gusts of perfume into my 
face! ... 


38d May 1849. —I have never felt any in- 
ward assurance of genius, or any presenti- 
ment of glory or of happiness. I have never 
seen myself in imagination great or famous, 
or even a husband, a father, an influential 
citizen. This indifference to the future, 


4 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to 
be taken as signs. What dreams I have 
are all vague and indefinite ; I ought not to 
live, for I am now scarcely capable of living. 
— Recognise your place ; let the living live ; 
and you, gather together your thoughts, 
leave behind you a legacy of feeling and 
ideas ; you will be most useful so. Re- 
nounce yourself, accept the cup given you, 
with its honey and its gall, as it comes, 
Bring God down into your heart. Embalm 
your soul in Him now, make within you a 
temple for the Holy Spirit; be diligent in 
good works, make others happier and better. 
Put personal ambition away from you, 
and then you will find consolation in living 
or in dying, whatever may happen to you. 


27th May 1849.—To be misunderstood 
even by those whom one loves is the cross 
and bitterness of life. It is the secret of 
that sad and melancholy smile on the lips 
of great men which so few understand ; it 
is the cruellest trial reserved for self-deyo- 
tion ; it is what must have oftenest wrung 
the heart of the Son of man; and if God 
could suffer, it would be the wound we 
should be for ever inflicting upon Him. He 
also — He above all—is the great misun- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 5 


derstood, the least comprehended. Alas! 
alas! Never to tire, never to grow cold; to 
be patient, sympathetic, tender; to look 
for the budding flower and the opening 
heart ; to hope always, like God; to love 
always, — this is duty. 


38d June 1849. — Fresh and delicious 
weather. Along morning walk. Surprised 
the hawthorn and wild rose-trees in flower. 
From the fields vague and health-giving 
scents. The Voirons fringed with dazzling 
mists, and tints of exquisite softness over 
the Saléve. Work in the fields, —two de- 
lightful donkeys, — one pulling greedily at 
a hedge of barberry. Then three little 
children. I felt a boundless desire to caress 
and play with them. To be able to enjoy 
such leisure, these peaceful fields, fine 
weather, contentment; to have my two 
sisters with me; to rest my eyes on balmy 
meadows and blossoming orchards ; to listen 
to the life singing in the grass and on the 
trees ; to be so calmly happy — is it not too 
much ? is it deserved? O let me enjoy it 
without reproaching heaven for its kind- 
ness ; let me enjoy it with gratitude. The 
days of trouble come soon enough and are 
many enough. I have no presentiment of 


6 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


happiness. All the more let me profit by 
the present. Come, kind Nature, smile and 
enchant me! Veil from me awhile my own 
griefs and those of others; let me see only 
the folds of thy queenly mantle, and hide 
all miserable and ignoble things from me 
under thy bounties and splendours ! 


lst October 1849. — Yesterday, Sunday, I 
read through and made extracts from the 
Gospel of St. John. It confirmed me in my 
belief that about Jesus we must believe no 
one but himself, and that what we have to 
do is to discover the true image of the 
founder behind all the prismatic refractions 
through which it comes to us, and which 
alter it more or less. A ray of heavenly 
light traversing human life, the message of 
Christ has been broken into a thousand 
rainbow colours, and carried in a thou- 
sand directions. It is the historical task 
of Christianity to assume with every suc- 
ceeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to 
be for ever spiritualising more and more 
her understanding of the Christ and of sal- 
vation. 

I am astounded at the incredible amount 
of Judaism and formalism which still exists 
nineteen centuries after the Redeemer’s 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 7 


proclamation ‘it is the letter which killeth’ 
— after his protest against a dead symbol- 
ism. The new religion is so profound that 
it is not understood even now, and would 
seem a blasphemy to the greater number of 
Christians. The person of Christ is the 
centre of it. Redemption, eternal life, 
divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarna- 
tion, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell, — 
all these beliefs have been so materialised 
and coarsened, that with a strange irony 
they present to us the spectacle of things 
having a profound meaning and yet carnally 
interpreted. Christian boldness and Chris- 
tian liberty must be reconquered ; it is the 
Church which is heretical, the Church 
whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. 
Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric 
doctrine, — there is a relative revelation ; 
each man enters into God so much as God 
enters into him, or as Angelus,? I think, 
said, ‘the eye by which I see God is the 
same eye by which He sees me.’ 

Christianity, if it is to triumph over pan- 
theism, must absorb it. To our pusillani- 
mous eyes Jesus would have borne the 
marks of a hateful pantheism, for he con- 
firmed the Biblical phrase ‘ye are gods,’ 
and so would St. Paul, who tells us that we 
are of ‘the race of God.’ 


8 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Our century wants a new theology — that 
is to say, a more profound explanation of 
the nature of Christ and of the light which 
it flashes upon heaven and upon humanity. 


Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the 
soul over the flesh —that is to say, over 
fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of cal- 
umny, of sickness, of isolation, and of 
death. There is no serious piety without 
heroism. Heroism is the dazzling and glo- 
rious concentration of courage. 


Duty has the virtue of making us feel the 
reality of a positive world while at the same 
time detaching us from it. 


30th December 1850.—The relation of 
thought to action filled my mind on waking, 
and I found myself carried towards a bizarre 
formula, which seems to have something of 
the night still clinging about it: Action is 
but coarsened thought —thought become 
concrete, obscure, and unconscious. It 
seemed to me that our most trifling actions, 
of eating, walking, and sleeping, were the 
condensation of a multitude of truths and 
thoughts, and that the wealth of ideas 
involved was in direct proportion to the 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 9 


commonness of the action (as our dreams are 
the more active, the deeper our sleep). We 
are hemmed round with mystery, and the 
greatest mysteries are contained in what 
we see and do every day. In all spontaneity 
the work of creation is reproduced in anal- 
ogy. When the spontaneity is unconscious, 
you have simple action; when it is con- 
scious —intelligent and moral action. At 
bottom this is nothing more than the propo- 
sition of Hegel: [‘ What is rational is real ; 
and what is real is rational’]; but it had 
never seemed to me more evident, more 
palpable. Everything which is, is thought, 
but not conscious and individual thought. 
The human intelligence is but the conscious- 
ness of being. It is what I have formu- 
lated before: Everything is a symbol of a 
symbol, and a symbol of what? of mind. 


. . . L have just been looking through the 
complete works of Montesquieu, and can- 
not yet make plain to myself the impression 
left on me by this singular style, with its 
mixture of gravity and affectation, of care- 
lessness and precision, of strength and 
delicacy ; so full of sly intention for all its 
coldness, expressing at once inquisitiveness 
and indifference, abrupt, piecemeal, like 


10 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


notes thrown together haphazard, and yet 
deliberate. I seem to see an intelligence 
naturally grave and austere donning a dress 
of wit for convention’s sake. The author 
desires to entertain as much as to teach, the 
thinker is also a bel-esprit, the jurisconsult 
has a touch of the coxcomb, and a per- 
fumed breath from the temple of Venus has 
penetrated the tribunal of Minos. Here we 
have austerity, as the century understood 
it, in philosophy or religion. In Montes- 
quieu, the art, if there is any, lies not in 
the words but in the matter. The words 
run freely and lightly, but the thought is 
self-conscious. 

- Each bud flowers but once and each 
flower has but its minute of perfect beauty ; 
so, in the garden of the soul each feeling 
has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one 
and only moment of expansive grace and 
radiant kingship. Each star passes but once 
in the night through the meridian over our 
heads and shines there but an instant ; so, 
in the heaven of the mind each thought 
touches its zenith but once, and in that 
moment all its brilliancy and all its great- 
ness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker — 
if you want to fix and immortalise your 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. II 


ideas or your feelings, seize them at this 
precise and fleeting moment, for it is their 
highest point. Before it, you have but 
vague outlines or dim presentiments of 
them. After it, you will have only weak- 
ened reminiscence or powerless regret ; that 
moment is the moment of your ideal. 


Spite is anger which is afraid to show 
itself, it is an impotent fury conscious of 
its impotence. 

Nothing resembles pride so much as dis- 
couragement. 

To repel one’s cross is to make it heavier. 

In the conduct of life, habits count for 
more than maxims, because habit is a 
living maxim, become flesh and instinct. 
To reform one’s maxims is nothing: it is 
but to change the title of the book. To 
learn new habits is everything, for it is to 
reach the substance of life. Life is but a 
tissue of habits. 


17th February 1851. —I have been read- 
ing, for six or seven hours without stopping, 
the Pensées of Joubert. I felt at first a 


12 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


very strong attraction towards the book, 
and a deep interest in it, but I have already 
a good deal cooled down. These scattered 
and fragmentary thoughts, falling upon one 
without a pause, like drops of light, tire, 
not my head, but my reasoning power. 
The merits of Joubert consist in the grace of 
the style, the vivacity or finesse of the criti- 
cisms, the charm of the metaphors ; but he 
starts many more problems than he solves, 
he notices and records more than he explains. 
His philosophy is merely literary and popu- 
:ar; his originality is only in detail and in 
execution. Altogether, he is a writer of 
reflections rather than a philosopher, a 
critic of remarkable gifts, endowed with 
exquisite sensibility, but, as an intelligence, 
destitute of the capacity for co-ordination. 
He wants concentration and continuity. It 
is not that he has no claims to be con- 
sidered a philosopher or an artist, but 
rather that he is both imperfectly, for he 
thinks and writes marvellously, on a@ small 
scale. He is an entomologist, a lapidary, a 
jeweller ; a coiner of sentences, of adages, 
of criticisms, of aphorisms, counsels, prob- 
lems; and his book, extracted from the 
accumulations of his journal during fifty 
years of his life, is a collection of precious 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 13 


stones, of butterflies, coins, and engraved 
gems. The whole, however, is more subtle 
than strong, more poetical than profound, 
and leaves upon the reader rather the im- 
pression of a great wealth of small curiosi- 
ties of value, than of a great intellectual 
existence and a new point of view. The 
place of Joubert seems to me then, below 
and very far from the philosophers and the 
true poets, but honourable among the mor- 
alists and the critics. He is one of those 
men who are superior to their works, and 
who have themselves the unity which these 
lack. This first judgment is, besides, in- 
discriminate and severe. I shall have to 
modify it later. 


20th February. —I have almost finished 
these two volumes of Pensées and the 
greater part of the Correspondance. This 
last has especially charmed me; it is re- 
markable for grace, delicacy, atticism, and 
precision. The chapters on metaphysics 
and philosophy are the most insignificant. 
All that has to do with large views, with 
the whole of things, is very little at Jou- 
bert’s command ; he has no philosophy of 
history, no speculative intuition. He is the 
thinker of detail, and his proper field is 


14 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


psychology and matters of taste. In this 
sphere of the subtleties and delicacies of 
imagination and feeling, within the circle 
of personal affections and preoccupations, 
of ‘social and educational interests, he 
abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine 
criticisms, in exquisite touches. It is like 
a bee going from flower to flower, a teasing, 
plundering, wayward zephyr, an olian 
harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through 
the leaves. Taken as a whole, there is 
something impalpable and immaterial about 
him, which I will not venture to call effem- 
inate, but which is scarcely manly. He 
wants bone and body: timid, dreamy, and 
clairvoyant, he hovers far above reality. 
He is rather a soul, a breath, than a man. 
It is the mind of a woman in the character 
of a child, so that we feel for him less ad- 
miration than tenderness and gratitude. 


27th February 1851.— Read over the first 
book of Emile. I was revolted, contrary 
to all expectation, for I opened the book 
with a sort of hunger for style and beauty. 
I was conscious instead of an impression of 
heaviness and harshness, of laboured, ham- 
mering emphasis, of something violent, 
passionate and obstinate, without serenity, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 15 


greatness, nobility. Both the qualities and 
the defects of the book produced in me a 
sense of lack of good manners, —a blaze of 
talent but no grace, no distinction, the ac- 
cent of good company wanting. I under- 
stood how it is that Rousseau rouses a 
particular kind of repugnance, the repug- 
nance of good taste, and I felt the danger 
to style involved in such a model, as well 
as the danger to thought arising from a 
truth so alloyed and sophisticated. What 
there is of true and strong in Rousseau did 
not escape me, and I still admired him, but 
his bad sides appeared to me with a clear- 
ness relatively new. 


(Same day.) — The pensée-writer is to 
the philosopher what the dilettante is to 
the artist. He plays with thought, and 
makes it produce a crowd of pretty things 
of detail, but he is more anxious about 
truths than truth, and what is essential in 
thought — its sequence, its unity — escapes 
him. He handles his instrument agreeably, 
but he does not possess it, still less does he 
create it. He is a gardener and not a geol- 
-ogist ; he cultivates the earth only so much 
as is necessary to make it produce for him 
flowers and fruits; he does not dig deep 


15 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


enough into it to understand it. In a word, 
the pensée-writer deals with what is super- 
ficial and fragmentary. He is the literary, 
the oratorical, the talking or writing philos- 
opher ; whereas the philosopher is the sci- 
entific pensée-writer. The pensée-writers 
serve to stimulate or to popularise the phi- 
losophers. They have thus a double use, 
besides their charm. They are the pioneers 
of the army of readers, the doctors of the 
crowd, the money-changers of thought, 
which they convert into current coin. The 
writer of pensées is a man of letters, though 
of a serious type, and therefore he is popu- 
lar. The philosopher is a specialist, as far 
as the form of his science goes, though not 
in substance, and therefore he can never 
become popular. In France, for one phi- 
losopher (Descartes) there have been thirty 
writers of pensées; in Germany, for ten 
such writers there have been twenty philos- 
ophers. 


25th March 1851.— How many illustrious 
men whom I have known have been already 
reaped by death, —Steffens, Marheineke, 
Neander, Mendelssohn, Thorwaldsen, Oelen- 
schliger, Geijer, Tegner, Oersted, Stuhr, 
Lachmann ; and with us, Sismondi, Tépffer, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 17 


de Candolle, — savants, artists, poets, musi- 
cians, historians. The old generation is 
going. What will the new bring us? What 
shall we ourselves contribute ? A few great 
old men —Schelling, Alexander von Hum- 
boldt, Schlosser — still link us with the glo- 
rious past. Who is preparing to bear the 
weight of the future? A shiver seizes us 
when the ranks grow thin around us, when 
age is stealing upon us, when we approach 
the zenith, and when Destiny says to us: 
‘Show what is in thee! Now is the mo- 
ment, now is the hour, else fall back into 
nothingness! It is thy turn! Give the 
world thy measure, say thy word, reveal 
thy nullity or thy capacity. Come forth 
from the shade! It is no longer a question 
of promising —thou must perform. The 
time of apprenticeship is over. Servant, 
show us what thou hast done with thy 
talent. Speak now, or be silent for ever.’ 
This appeal of the conscience is a solemn 
summons in the life of every man, solemn 
and awful as the trumpet of the last judg- 
ment. It cries, ‘Art thou ready? Give 
an account. Give an account of thy years, 
thy leisure, thy strength, thy studies, thy 
talent, and thy works. Now and here is 
the hour of great hearts, the hour of hero- 
ism and of genius.’ 


18 AMIEL 3 JOURNAL. 


6th April 1851.— Was there ever any 
one so vulnerable as I? If I were a father 
how many griefs and vexations a child 
might cause me. As a husband, I should 
have a thousand ways of suffering, because 
my happiness demands a thousand condi- 
tions. I have a heart too easily reached, a 
too restless imagination ; despair is easy to 
me, and every sensation reverberates again 
and again within me. What might be, 
spoils for me what is. What ought to be 
consumes me with sadness. So that reality, 
the present, the irreparable, the necessary, 
repel and even terrify me. I have too 
much imagination, conscience, and pene- 
tration, and not enough character. The 
life of thought alone seems to me to have 
enough elasticity and immensity, to be free 
enough from the irreparable ; practical life 
makes me afraid. 

And yet, at the same time, it attracts 
me; I have need of it. Family life, espe- 
cially, in all its delightfulness, in all its 
moral depth, appeals to me almost like a 
duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the 
ideal of it. A companion of my life, of my 
work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within, 
a@ common worship, towards the world out- 
side, kindness and beneficence ; educations 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 19 


to undertake, the thousand and one moral 
relations which develop round the first — 
all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes. 
But I put them aside, because every hope 
is, as it were, an egg whence a serpent may 
issue instead of a dove, because every joy 
missed is a stab; because every seed con- 
fided to destiny contains an ear of grief 
which the future may develop. 

Iam distrustful of myself and of happi- 
ness because I know myself. The ideal 
poisons for me all imperfect possession. 
Everything which compromises the future 
or destroys my inner liberty, which enslaves 
me to things or obliges me to be other than 
I could and ought to be, all which injures 
my idea of the perfect man, hurts me mor- 
tally, degrades and wounds me in mind, 
even beforehand. I abhor useless regrets 
and repentances. The fatality of the con- 
sequences which follow upon every human 
act, —the leading idea of dramatic art and 
the most tragic element of life, — arrests 
me more certainly than the arm of the 
Commandeur. I only act with regret, and 
almost by force. 

To be dependent is to me terrible; but to 
depend upon what is irreparable, arbitrary, 
and unforeseen, and above all to be so de- 


20 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


pendent by my own fault and through my 
own error — to give up liberty and hope, to 
slay sleep and happiness—this would be 
hell! 

All that is necessary, providential —in 
short, unimputable —I could bear, I think, 
with some strength of mind. But responsi- 
bility mortally envenoms grief; and as an 
act is essentially voluntary, therefore I act 
as little as possible. 

Last outbreak of a rebellious and deceit- 
tul self-will, —craving for repose, for satis- 
faction, for independence !—is there not 
some relic of selfishness in such a disinter- 
estedness, such a fear, such idle suscepti- 
bility ? 

I wish to fulfil my duty — but where is it, 
what is it? Here inclination comes in 
again and interprets the oracle. And the 
ultimate question is this: Does duty con- 
sist in obeying one’s nature, even the best 
and most spiritual ? or in conquering it ? 

Life, is it essentially the education of the 
mind and intelligence, or that of the will ? 
And does will show itself in strength or in 
resignation ? If the aim of life is to teach us 
renunciation, then welcome sickness, hin- 
drances, sufferings of every kind! But if 
its aim is to produce the perfect man, then 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 21 


one must watch over one’s integrity of mind 
and body. To court trial is to tempt God. 
At bottom, the God of justice veils from 
me the God of love. I tremble instead of 
trusting. 

Whenever conscience speaks with a di- 
vided, uncertain, and disputed voice, it is 
not yet the voice of God. Descend still 
deeper into yourself, until you hear nothing 
but a clear and undivided voice, a voice 
which does away with doubt and brings 
with it persuasion, light, and serenity. 
Happy, says the Apostle, are they who are 
at peace with themselves, and whose heart 
condemneth them not in the part they take. 
This inner identity, this unity of convic 
tion, is all the more difficult the more the 
mind analyses, discriminates, and foresees. 
It is difficult, indeed, for liberty to return 
to the frank unity of instinct. 

Alas! we must then re-climb a thousand 
times the peaks already scaled, and recon- 
quer the points of view already won, — we 
must fight the fight! The human heart, 
like kings, signs mere truces under a pre- 
tence of perpetual peace. The eternal life 
is eternally to be re-won. Alas, yes! peace 
itself is a struggle, or rather it is struggle 
and activity which are the law. We only 


22 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


find rest in effort, as the flame only finds 
existence in combustion. O Heraclitus! the 
symbol of happiness is after all the same 
as that of grief ; anxiety and hope, hell and 
heaven, are equally restless. The altar of 
Vesta and the sacrifice of Beelzebub burn 
with the same fire. Ah, yes, there you 
have life—life double-faced and double- 
edged. The fire which enlightens is also 
the fire which consumes; the element of 
the gods may become that of the accursed. 


7th April 1851. — Read a part of Ruge’s* 
volume Die Academie (1848) where the 
humanism of the Neo-Hegelians in politics, 
religion, and literature is represented by 
correspondence or articles (Kuno Fischer, 
Kollach, etc.). They recall the philosophist 
party of the last century, able to dissolve 
anything by reason and reasoning, but un- 
able to construct anything; for construc- 
tion rests upon feeling, instinct, and will. 
- One finds them mistaking philosophic con- 
sciousness for realising power, the redemp- 
tion of the intelligence for the redemption 
of the heart —that is to say, the part for 
the whole. These papers make me under- 
stand the radical difference between morals 
and intellectualism. The writers of them 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 23 


wish to supplant religion by philosophy. 
Man is the principle of their religion, and 
intellect is the climax of man. Their relig- 
ion, then, is the religion of intellect. There 
you have the two worlds: Christianity 
brings and preaches salvation by the con- 
version of the will,—humanism by the 
emancipation of the mind. One attacks 
the heart, the other-the brain. Both wish 
to enable man to reach his ideal. But the 
ideal differs, if not by its content, at least 
by the disposition of its content, by the 
predominance and sovereignty given to this 
or that inner power. For one, the mind is 
the organ of the soul; for the other, the 
soul is an inferior state of the mind; the 
one wishes to enlighten by making better, 
the other to make better by enlightening. 
It is the difference between Socrates and 
Jesus. 

The cardinal question is that of sin. The 
question of immanence or of dualism is 
secondary. The Trinity, the life to come, 
paradise and hell, may cease to be dogmas 
and spiritual realities, the form and the 
letter may vanish away, —the question of 
humanity remains: What is it which 
saves? How can man be led to be truly 
man? Is the ultimate root of his being 


24 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


responsibility, — yes orno? And is doing 
or knowing the right, acting or thinking, 
his ultimate end? If science does not pro- 
duce love it is insufficient. Now, all that 
science gives is the amor intellectualis of 
Spinoza, light without warmth, a resigna- 
tion which is contemplative and grandiose, 
but inhuman, because it is scarcely trans- 
missible and remains a privilege, one of the 
rarest of all. Moral love places the centre 
of the individual in the centre of being. It 
has at least salvation in principle, the germ 
of eternal life. To love is virtually to know ; 
to know is not virtually to love; there you 
have the relation of these two modes of 
man. The redemption wrought by science 
or by intellectual love is then inferior to 
the redemption wrought by will or by moral 
love. The first may free a man from him- 
self, it may enfranchise him from egotism. 
The second drives the ego out of itself, 
makes it active and fruitful. The one is 
critical, purifying, negative; the other is 
vivifying, fertilising, positive. Science, 
however spiritual and substantial it may be 
in itself, is still formal relatively to love. 
Moral force is then the vital point. ; 
And this force is only produced by moral 
force. Like alone acts upon like. There- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 25 


fore do not amend by reasoning, but by ex- 
ample ; approach feeling by feeling; do not 
hope to excite love except by love. Be what 
you wish others to become. Let your self 
and not your words preach for you. 

Philosophy, then, to return to the subject, 
can never replace religion ; revolutionaries 
are not apostles, although the apostles may 
haye been revolutionaries. To save from 
the outside to the inside — and by the out- 
side I understand also the intelligence 
relatively to the will—is an error and a 
danger. The negative part of the human- 
ist’s work is good ; it will strip Christianity 
of an outer shell, which has become super- 
fluous ; but Ruge and Feuerbach cannot 
save humanity. She must have her saints 
and her heroes to complete the work of her 
philosophers. Science is the power of man, 
and love his strength; man becomes man 
only by the intelligence, but he 7s man only 
by the heart. Knowledge, love, power, — 
there is the complete life. 


16th June 1851. — This evening I walked 
up and down on the Pont des Bergues, 
under a clear moonless heaven, delighting 
in the freshness of the water, streaked with 
light from the two quays, and glimmering 


26 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


under the twinkling stars. Meeting all 
these different groups of young people, 
families, couples, and children, who were 
returning to their homes, to their garrets 
or their drawing-rooms, singing or talking 
as they went, I felt a movement of sym- 
pathy for all these passers-by ; my eyes and 
ears became those of a poet or a painter; 
while even one’s mere kindly curiosity 
seems to bring with it a joy in living and 
in seeing others live. 


15th August 1851,—'To know how to be 
ready, — a great thing —a precious gift, — 
and one that implies calculation, grasp and 
decision. To be always ready, a man must 
be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot 
be untied ; he must know how to disengage 
what is essential from the detail in which it 
is enwrapped, for everything cannot be 

‘equally considered ; in a word, he must be 
able to simplify his duties, his business, and 
his life. To know how to be ready, is to 
know how to start. 

It is astonishing how all of us are gen- 
erally cumbered up with the thousand and 
one hindrances and duties which are not 
such, but which nevertheless wind us about. 
with their spider threads and fetter the 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 27 


movement of our wings. It is the lack of 
order which makes us slaves ; the confusion 
of to-day discounts the freedom of to- 
morrow. 

Confusion is the enemy of all comfort, 
and confusion is born of procrastination. 
To know how to be ready we must be able 
to finish. Nothing is done but what is fin- 
ished. The things which we leave drag- 
ging behind us will start up again later on 
before us and harass our path. Let each 
day take thought for what concerns it, 
liquidate its own affairs and respect the day 
which is to follow, and then we shall be 
always ready. To know how to be ready, 
is at bottom to know how to die. 


2d September 1851. —Read the work of 
Tocqueville (De la Democratie en Amé- 
vigue). My impression is as yet a mixed 
one. A fine’ book, but I feel in it a little 
too much imitation of Montesquieu. This 
abstract, piquant, sententious style, too, is 
a little dry, over-refined and monotonous. 
Tt has too much cleverness and not enough 
imagination. It makes one think, more 
than it charms, and though really serious, 
it seems flippant. His method of splitting 
up a thought, of illuminating a subject by 


28 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


successive facets, has serious inconven- 
iences. We see the details too clearly, to 
the detriment of the whole. A multitude of 
sparks gives but a poor light. Neverthe- 
less, the author is evidently a ripe and 
penetrating intelligence, who takes a com- 
prehensive view of his subject, while at 
the same time possessing a power of acute 
and exhaustive analysis. 


6th September. — Tocqueville’s book has 
on the whole a calming effect upon the 
mind, but it leaves a certain sense of dis- 
gust behind. It makes one realise the 
necessity of what is happening around us 
and the inevitableness of the goal prepared 
for us; but it also makes it plain that the 
era of mediocrity in everything is beginning, 
and mediocrity freezes all desire. Equality 
engenders uniformity, and it is by sacrific- 
ing what is excellent, remarkable, and ex- 
traordinary that we get rid of what is bad. 
The whole becomes less barbarous, and at 
the same time more vulgar. 

The age of great men is going; the epoch 
of the ant-hill, of life in multiplicity, is be- 
ginning. The century of individualism, if 
abstract equality triumphs, runsa great risk 
of seeing no more true individuals. By 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 29 


continual levelling and division of labour, 
society will become everything and man 
nothing. 

As the floor of valleys is raised by the 
denudation and washing down of the 
mountains, what is average will rise at 
the expense of what is great. The excep- 
tional will disappear. A plateau with 
fewer and fewer undulations, without con- 
trasts and without oppositions, —such will 
be the aspect of human society. The statis- 
tician will register a growing progress, and 
the moralist a gradual decline: on the one 
hand, a progress of things ; on the other, a 
decline of souls. The useful will take the 
place of the beautiful, industry of art, po- 
litical economy of religion, and arithmetic 
of poetry. The spleen will become the 
malady of a levelling age. 

Is this indeed the fate reserved for the 
democratic era ? May not the general well- 
being be purchased too dearly at sucha 
price? The creative force which in the 
beginning we see for ever tending to pro- 
duce and multiply differences, will it after- 
wards retrace its steps and obliterate them 
one by one? And equality, which in the 
dawn of existence is mere inertia, torpor, 
and death, is it to become at last the natu- 


30 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


ral form of life? Or rather, above the 
economic and political equality to which 
the socialist and non-socialist democracy 
aspires, taking it too often for the term of 
its efforts, will there not arise a new king- 
dom of mind, a church of refuge, a republic 
of souls, in which, far beyond the region of 
mere right and sordid utility, beauty, devo- 
tion, holiness, heroism, enthusiasm, the 
extraordinary, the infinite, shall have a 
worship and an abiding city? Utilitarian 
materialism, barren wellbeing, the idolatry 
of the flesh and of the ‘I,’ of the temporal 
and of mammon, are they to be the goal of 
our efforts, the final recompense promised 
to the labours of our race? I do not be- 
lieve it. The ideal of humanity is some- 
thing different and higher. But the animal 
in us must be satisfied first, and we must 
first banish from among us all suffering 
which is superfluous and has its origin in 
social arrangements, before we can return 
to spiritual goods. 


7th September 1851 (Aix). —It is ten 
o’clock at night. A strange and mystic 
moonlight, with a fresh breeze and a sky 
crossed by a few wandering clouds, makes 
our terrace delightful. These pale and 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 31 


gentle rays shed from the zenith a subdued 

and penetrating peace ; it is like the calm 
joy or the pensive smile of experience, com- 
bined with a certain stoic strength. The 
stars shine, the leaves tremble in the silver 
light. Not a sound in all the landscape ; 
great gulfs of shadow under the green alleys 
and at the corners of the steps. Every- 
thing is secret, solemn, mysterious. 

O night hours, hours of silence and soli- 
tude !— with you are grace and melan- 
choly ; you sadden and you console. You 
speak to us of all that has passed away, and 
_ of all that must still die, but you say to us, 
‘ Courage !’— and you promise us rest. 


9th November 1851 (Sunday). — At the 
Church of St. Gervais, a second sermon 
from Adolphe Monod, less grandiose per- 
haps, but almost more original, and to me 
more edifying, than that of last Sunday. The 
subject was St. Paul or the active life, his 
former one having been St. John or the inner 
life, of the Christian. I felt the golden spell 
of eloquence: I found myself hanging on 
the lips of the orator, fascinated by his 
boldness, his grace, his energy, and his art, 
his sincerity and his talent; and it was 
borne in upon me that for some men diffi- 


32 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


culties are a source of inspiration, so that 
what would make others stumble is for 
them the occasion of their highest triumphs. 
He made St. Paul cry during an hour and a 
half; he made an old nurse of him, he 
hunted up his old cloak, his prescriptions of 
water and wine to Timothy, the canvas that 
he mended, his friend Tychicus, —in short, 
all that could raise a smile ; and from it he 
drew the most unfailing pathos, the most 
austere and penetrating lessons. He made 
the whole St. Paul, martyr, apostle, and 
man,—his grief, his charities, his tender- 
ness, live again before us, and this with a 
grandeur, an unction, a warmth of reality, 
such as I had never seen equalled. 

How stirring is such an apotheosis of pain 
in our century of comfort, when shepherds 
and sheep alike sink benumbed in Capuan 
languors, —such an apotheosis of ardent 
charity in a time of coldness and indiffer- 
ence towards souls, —such an apotheosis 
of a human, natural, inbred Christianity, 
in an age, when some put it, so to speak, 
above man, and others below man! Finally, 
as a peroration, he dwelt upon the neces- 
sity for a new people, for a stronger gener- 
ation, if the world is to be saved from the 
tempests which threaten it. ‘People of 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 33 


God, awake! Sow in tears, that ye may 
reap in triumph!’ What a study is such a 
sermon! I felt all the extraordinary liter- 
ary skill of it, while my eyes were still dim 
with tears. Diction, composition, similes, 
—all is instructive and precious to re- 
member. I was astonished, shaken, taken 
hold of. ; 


18th November 1851. — The energetic 
subjectivity, which has faith in itself, which 
does not fear to be something particular 
and definite without any consciousness or 
shame of its subjective illusion, is unknown 
to me. I am, so far as the intellectual 
order is concerned, essentially objective, 
and my distinctive speciality is to be able 
to place myself in all points of view, to see 
through all eyes, to emancipate myself, 
that is to say, from the individual prison. 
Hence aptitude for theory and irresolution 
in practice ; hence critical talent and a dif- 
ficulty in spontaneous production. Hence, 
also, a continuous uncertainty of convic- 
tion and opinion, so long as my aptitude 
remained mere instinct; but now that it is 
conscious and possesses itself, it is able to 
conclude and affirm in its turn, so that, 
after having brought disquiet, it now brings 


34 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


peace. It says: ‘There is no repose for 
the mind except in the absolute ; for feel- 
ing, except in the infinite ; for the soul, ex- 
cept in the divine.’ Nothing finite is true, 
is interesting, or worthy to fix my atten- 
tion. All that is particular is exclusive, 
and all that is exclusive repels me. There 
is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my 
end is communion with Being through the 
whole of Being. ‘Then, in the light of the 
absolute, every idea becomes worth study- 
ing; in that of the infinite, every existence 
worth respecting; in that of the divine, 
every creature worth loving. 


2d December 1851.— Let mystery have 
its place in you; do not be always turning 
up your whole soil with the ploughshare of 
self-examination, but leave a little fallow 
corner in your heart ready for any seed the 
winds may bring, and reserve a nook of 
shadow for the passing bird; keep a place 
in your heart for the unexpected guest, an 
altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird 
sing among your branches, do not be too 
eager to tame it. If you are conscious 
of something new—thought or feeling — 
wakening in the depths of your being, do 
not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 35 


look at it; let the springing germ have the 
protection of being forgotten, hedge it 
round with quiet, and do not break in upon 
its darkness ; let it take shape and grow, 
and not a word of your happiness to any 
one! Sacred work of nature as it is, all 
conception should be enwrapped by the 
triple veil of modesty, silence, and night. 

Kindness is the principle of tact, and re- 
spect for others the first condition of savoir- 
vivre. . 


_ He who is silent is forgotten; he who 
abstains is taken at his word ; he who does 
not advance, falls back; he who stops is 
overwhelmed, distanced, crushed ; he who 
ceases to grow greater becomes smaller ; he 
who leaves off, gives up; the stationary 
condition is the beginning of the end — it 
is the terrible symptom which precedes 
death. To live, is to achieve a perpetual 
triumph ; it is to assert one’s self against 
destruction, against sickness, against the 
annulling and dispersion of one’s physical 
and moral being. It is to will without 
ceasing, or rather to refresh one’s will day 
by day. 


° ° ° ° 


36 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


{t is not history which teaches conscience 
to be honest; it is the conscience which 
educates history. Fact is corrupting, — it 
is we who correct it by the persistence of 
our ideal. The soul moralises the past in 
order not to be demoralised by it. Like 
the alchemists of the middle age, she finds 
in the crucible of experience only the gold 
that she herself has a into it. 


1st Bein “1852 (Sandie, —— Pagndd 
the afternoon in reading the Monologues of 
Schleiermacher. This little book made an 
impression on me almost as deep as it did 
twelve years ago, when I read it for the first 
time. Itreplunged me into the inner world, 
to which I return with joy whenever I may 
have forsaken it. I was able, besides, to 
measure my progress since then by the 
transparency of all the thoughts to me, and 
by the freedom with which I entered into 
and judged the point of view. 

It is great, powerful, profound, but there 
is still pride in it, and even selfishness. For 
the centre of the universe is still the Self, 
the great Ich of Fichte. The tameless 
liberty, the divine dignity of the individual 
spirit, expanding till it admits neither any 
limit nor anything foreign to itself, and 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 37 


conscious of a strength instinct with creative 
force, —such is the point of view of the 
Monologues. 

The inner life in its enfranchisement from 
time, in its double end, the realisation of 
the species and of the individuality, in its 
proud dominion over all hostile circum- 
stance, in its prophetic certainty of the 
future, in its immortal youth —such is their 
theme. Through them we are enabled to 
enter into a life of monumental interest, 
wholly original and beyond the influence of 
anything exterior — an astonishing example 
of the autonomy of the ego, an imposing 
type of character — Zeno and Fichte in one. 
But still the motive power of this life is not 
religious ; it is rather moral and philosophic. 
I see in it not so much a magnificent model 
to imitate as a precious subject of study. 
This ideal of a liberty, absolute, indefeasi- 
ble, inviolable, respecting itself above all, 
disdaining the visible and the universe, and 
developing itself after its own laws alone, is 
also the ideal of Emerson, the Stoic of a 
young America. According to it, man finds 
his joy in himself, and, safe in the inacces- 
sible sanctuary of his personal conscious- 
ness, becomes almost a god. He is himself 
principle, motive, and end of his own des- 


299427 


38 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


tiny ; he is himself, and that is enough for 
him. ‘This superb triumph of life is not far 
from being a sort of impiety, or at least a 
displacement of adoration. By the mere 
fact that it does away with humility, such 
a superhuman point of view becomes dan- 
gerous; it is the very temptation to which 
the first man succumbed, that of becoming 
his own master by becoming like unto the 
Elohim, Here then the heroism of the 
philosopher approaches temerity, and the 
Monologues are therefore open to three 
reproaches : — 

Ontologically, the position of man in the 
spiritual universe is wrongly indicated ; the 
individual soul, not being unique and not 
springing from itself, can it be conceived 
without God? Psychologically, the force 
of spontaneity in the ego is allowed a do- 
minion too exclusive of any other. As a 
fact, it is not everything in man. Morally, 
evil is scarcely named, and conflict, the con- 
dition of true peace, is left out of count. 
So that the peace described in the Mono- 
logues is neither a conquest by man nor a 
grace from heaven ; it is rather a stroke of 
good fortune. 


2d February.—Still the Monologues. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 39 


Critically I defended myself enough against 
them yesterday; I may abandon myself 
now, without scruple and without danger, 
to the admiration and the sympathy with 
which they inspireme. This life so proudly 
independent, this sovereign conception of 
human dignity, this actual possession of 
the universe and the infinite, this perfect 
emancipation from all which passes, this 
calm sense of strength and superiority, this 
invincible energy of will, this infallible 
clearness of self-vision, this autocracy of 
the consciousness which is its own master, 
—aill these decisive marks of a royal per- 
sonality, of a nature Olympian, profound, 
complete, harmonious, penetrate the mind 
with joy and the heart with gratitude. 
What a life! whataman! These glimpses 
into the inner regions of a great soul do one 
good. Contact of this kind strengthens, 
restores, refreshes. Courage returns as we 
gaze ; when we see what has been, we doubt 
no more that it can be again. At the sight 
of a man we too aay to ourselves, Let us 
also be men. 


8d March 1852. — Opinion has its value 
and even its power: to have it against us 
is painful when we are among friends, and 


40 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


harmful in the case of the outer world. We 
should neither flatter opinion nor court it ; 
but it is better, 1f we can help it, not to 
throw it on to a false scent. The first error 
is a meanness ; the second an imprudence. 
We should be ashamed of the one ; we may 
regret the other. Look to yourself; you 
are much given to this last fault, and it has 
already done you great harm. Be ready to 
bend your pride ; abase yourself even so far 
as to show yourself ready and clever like 
others. This world of skilful egotisms and 
active ambitions, —this world of men, in 
which one must deceive by smiles, conduct, 
and silence as much as by actual words, — 
a world revolting to the proud and upright 
soul, it is our business to learn to live in it! 
Success is required in it—succeed. Only 
force is recognised there: bestrong. Opin- 
ion seeks to impose her law upon all,— 
instead of setting her at defiance, it would 
be better to struggle with her and conquer. 
. . . LT understand the indignation of con- 
tempt, and the wish to crush, roused irre- 
sistibly by all that creeps, all that is 
tortuous, oblique, ignoble. . . . But I can- 
not maintain such a mood— which is a 
mood of vengeance —for long. This world 
is a world of men, and these men are our 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 4! 


brothers. We must not banish from us the 
divine breath, — we must love. Evil must 
be conquered by good ; and before all things 
one must keep a pure conscience. Prudence 
may be preached from this point of view 
too. ‘Be ye simple as the dove and pru. 
dent as the serpent,’ are words of Jesus. 
Be careful of your reputation, not through 
vanity, but that you may not harm your 
life’s work, and out of love for truth. 
There is still something of self-seeking in 
the refined disinterestedness which will not 
justify itself, that it may feel itself superior 
to opinion. It requires ability, to make 
what we seem agree with what we are, — 
and humility, to feel that we are no great 
things. 

There, thanks to this Journal, my excite-~ 
ment has passed away. I have just read 
the last book of it through again, and the 
morning has passed by. On the way I 
have been conscious of a certain amount 
of monotony. It does not signify! These 
pages are not written to be read; they are 
written for my own consolation and warn- 
ing. They are landmarks in my past; and 
some of the landmarks are funeral crosses, 
stone pyramids, withered stalks grown 
green again, white pebbles, coins, — all of 


42 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


them helpful towards finding one’s way 
again through the Elysian fields of the soul. 
The pilgrim has marked his stages in it; 
he is able to trace by it his thoughts, his 
tears, his joys. This is my travelling 
diary : if some passages from it may be use- 
ful to others, and if sometimes even I have 
communicated such passages to the public, 
these thousand pages as a whole are only 
of value to me and to those who, after me, 
may take some interest in the itinerary of 
an obscurely-conditioned soul, far from the 
world’s noise and fame. These sheets will 
be monotonous when my life is so; they 
will repeat themselves when feelings repeat 
themselves; truth at any rate will be al- 
ways there, and truth is their only muse, 
their only pretext, their only duty. 


2d April 1852. — What a lovely walk! 
Sky clear, sun rising, all the tints bright, 
all the outlines sharp, save for the soft and 
misty infinite of the lake. A pinch of 
white frost powdered the fields, lending a 
metallic relief to the hedges of green box, 
and to the whole landscape — still without 
leaves —an air of health and vigour, of 
youth and freshness. ‘Bathe, O disciple, 
thy thirsty soul in the dew of the dawn!’ 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 43 


suys Faust to us, and he is right. The 
morning air breathes a new and laughing 
energy into veins and marrow. If every 
day is a repetition of life, every dawn signs 
as it were a new contract with existence. 
At dawn everything is fresh, light, simple, 
as it is for children. At dawn spiritual 
truth, like the atmosphere, is more trans- 
parent, and our organs, like the young 
leaves, drink in the light more eagerly, 
breathe in more ether, and less of things 
earthly. If night and the starry sky speak 
to the meditative soul of God, of eternity 
and the infinite, the dawn is the time for 
projects, for resolutions, for the birth of 
action. While the silence and the ‘sad 
serenity of the azure vault’ incline the soul 
to self-recollection, the vigour and gaiety of 
nature spread into the heart and make it 
eager for life and living. —Spring is upon 
us. Primroses and violets have already 
hailed her coming. Rash blooms are show- 
ing on the peach trees ; the swollen buds of 
the pear trees and the lilacs point to the 
blossoming that is to be ; the honeysuckles 
are already green. 


26th April 1852. — This evening a feeling 
of emptiness took possession of me; and 


44 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


the solemn ideas of duty, the future, soli- 
tude, pressed themselves upon me. I gave 
myself to meditation—a very necessary 
defence against the dispersion and distrac- 
tion brought about by the day’s work and 
its detail. Read a part of Krause’s book, 
Urbild der Menschheit,6 which answered 
marvellously to my thought and my need. 
This philosopher has always a beneficent 
effect upon me ; his sweet religious serenity 
gains upon me and invades me. He in- 
spires me with a sense of peace and infinity. 

Still, I miss something —common wor- 
ship, a positive religion, shared with other 
people. Ah! when will the Church to 
which I belong in heart rise into being? I 
cannot, like Scherer, content myself with 
being in the right all alone. I must have 
a less solitary Christianity. My religious 
needs are not satisfied any more than my 
social needs, or my needs of affection. 
Generally I am able to forget them and lull 
them to sleep. But at times they wake up 
with a sort of painful bitterness. ... I 
waver between languor and ennui, between 
frittering myself away on the infinitely lit- 
tle, and longing after what is unknown and 
distant. It is like the situation which 
French novelists are so fond of, the story 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 45 


of a vie de province; only the province is 
all that is not the country of the soul, every 
place where the heart feels itself strange, 
dissatisfied, restless, and thirsty. Alas! 
well understood, this place is the earth, 
this country of one’s dreams is heaven, and 
this suffering is the eternal home-sickness, 
the thirst for happiness. 

‘In der Beschrinkung zeigt sich erst der 
Meister,’ says Goethe. Male résignation, 
—this also is the motto of those who are 
masters of the art of life; ‘manly ’—that 
is to say, courageous, active, resolute, per- 
severing, — ‘resignation,’ that is to say, 
self-sacrifice, renunciation, limitation. En- 
ergy in resignation — there lies the wisdom 
of the sons of earth, the only serenity pos- 
sible in this life of struggle and of combat. 
In it is the peace of martyrdom, in it too 
the promise of triumph. 


28th April 1852 (Lancy).?—Once more 
I feel the spring languor creeping over me, 
the spring air about me. This morning the 
poetry of the scene, the song of the birds, 
the tranquil sunlight, the breeze blowing 
over the fresh green fields —all rose into 
and filled my heart. Now all is silent. O 
silence, thou art terrible ! — terrible as that 


46 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


calm of the ocean which lets the eye pene- 
trate the fathomless abysses below. Thou 
showest us in ourselves depths which make 
us giddy, inextinguishable needs, treasures 
of suffering. Welcome tempests ! — at least 
they blur and trouble the surface of these 
waters with their terrible secrets. Wel- 
come the passion blasts which stir the 
waves of the soul, and so veil from us its 
bottomless gulfs! In all of us, children of 
dust, sons of time, eternity inspires an 
involuntary anguish, and the infinite, a 
mysterious terror. We seem to be entering 
a kingdom of the dead. Poor heart, thy 
craving is for life, for love, for illusions! 
And thou art right after all, for life is sacred. 

In these moments of téte-d-téte with the 
infinite, how different life looks! How all 
that usually occupies and excites us becomes 
suddenly puerile, frivolous, and vain. We 
seem to ourselves mere puppets, mario- 
nettes, strutting seriously through a fantas- 
tic show, and mistaking gewgaws for things 
of great price. At such moments, how every- 
thing becomes transformed, how everything 
changes! Berkeley and Fichte seem right 
— Emerson too; the world is but an alle- 
gory ; the idea is more real than the fact; 
fairy tales, legends, are as true as natural 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 47 


history, and even more true, for they are 
emblems of greater transparency. The 
only substance properly so called is the 
soul. What is allthe rest? Mere shadow, 
pretext, figure, symbol, or dream. Con- 
sciousness alone is immortal, positive, per- 
fectly real. The world is but a firework, 
a sublime phantasmagoria, destined to cheer 
and form the soul. Consciousness is a 
universe, and its sunis love... . 

Already I am falling back into the objec- 
tive light of thought. It delivers me from 
—shall I say ?—no, it deprives me of the 
intimate life of feeling. Reflection dis- 
solves reverie and burns her delicate wings. 
This is why science does not make men, 
but merely entities and abstractions. Ah, 
let us feel and live and beware of too much 
analysis! Let us put spontaneity, naiveté 
before reflection, experience before study ; 
let us make life itself our study. Shall I 
then never have the heart of a woman to 
rest upon? a son in whom to live again, 
a little world where I may see flowering 
and blooming all that is stifled in me? I 
shrink and draw back, for fear of breaking 
my dream. I have staked so much on this 
card that I dare not play it. Let me dream 
again.... ‘ 


48 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Do no violence to yourself, respect in 
yourself the oscillations of feeling. They 
are your life and your nature; One wiser 
than you ordained them. Do not abandop 
yourself altogether either to instinct or to 
will. Instinct is a siren, will a despot. Be 
neither the slave of your impulses and sen- 
sations of the moment, nor of an abstract 
and general plan; be open to what life 
brings from within and without, and wel- 
come the unforeseen ; but give to your life 
unity, and bring the unforeseen within the 
lines of your plan. Let what is natural in 
you raise itself to the level of the spiritual, 
and let the spiritual become once more 
natural. Thus will your development be 
harmonious, and the peace of heaven will 
shine upon your brow ;—always on condi- 
tion that your peace is made, and that you 
have climbed your Calvary. 


Afternoon. —Shall I ever enjoy again ° 
those marvellous reveries of past days, — 
as, for instance, once, when I was still 
quite a youth, in the early dawn, sitting 
amongst the ruins of the castle of Fau- 
cigny; another time in the mountains 
above Lavey, under the midday sun, lying 
under a tree and visited by three butter- 
flies; and again another night on the 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 49 


sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched 
full length upon the beach, my eyes wan- 
dering over the Milky Way? Will they 
ever return to me, those grandiose, immor- 
tal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems 
to carry the world in one’s breast, to touch 
the stars, to possess the infinite? Divine 
moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought 
flies from world to world, penetrates the 
great enigma, breathes with a respiration 
large, tranquil, and profound like that of 
the ocean, and hovers serene and boundless 
like the blue heaven! Visits from the 
muse Urania, who traces around the fore- 
heads of those she loves the phosphores- 
cent nimbus of contemplative power, and 
who pours into their hearts the tranquil 
intoxication, if not the authority of genius, 
— moments of irresistible intuition in which 
a man feels himself great like the universe 
and calm like a god! From the celestial 
spheres down to the shell or the moss, the 
whole of creation is then submitted to our 
gaze, lives in our breast, and accomplishes 
in us its eternal work with the regularity of 
destiny and the passionate ardour of love. 
What hours, what memories! ‘The traces 
which remain to us of them are enough to fill 
us with respect and enthusiasm, as though 
they had been visits of the Holy Spirit. 


50 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


And then, to fall back again from these 
heights with their boundless horizons into 
the muddy ruts of triviality!— what a 
fall!— Poor Moses! Thou too sawest un- 
dulating in the distance the ravishing hills 
of the Promised Land, and it was thy fate 
nevertheless to lay thy weary bones in a 
grave dug in the desert!— Which of us 
has not his promised land, his day of 
ecstasy and his death in exile? What a 
pale counterfeit is real life of the life we see 
in glimpses, and how these flaming light- 
nings of our prophetic youth make the 
twilight of our dull monotonous manhood 
more dark and:dreary ! 


29th April (Lancy).— This morning the 
air was calm, the sky slightly veiled. I 
went out into the garden to see what prog- 
ress the spring was making. I strolled 
from the irises to the lilacs, round the 
flower-beds, and in the shrubberies. De- 
lightful surprise! at the corner of the 
walk, half hidden under a thick clump of 
shrubs, a small-leaved chorchorus had flow- 
ered during the night. Gay and fresh as a 
bunch of bridal flowers, the little shrub 
glittered before me, in all the attraction of 
its opening beauty. What spring-like inno- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 51 


cence, what soft and modest loveliness there 
was in these white corollas, opening gently 
to the sun, like thoughts which smile upon 
us at waking, and perched upon their 
young leaves of virginal green like bees 
upon the wing! Mother of marvels, mys- 
terious and tender Nature, why do we not 
live more in thee? The poetical faneurs 
of Tépffer, his Charles and Jules, the 
friends and passionate lovers of thy secret 
graces, the dazzled and ravished beholders 
of thy beauties, rose up in my memory, at 
once a reproach and a lesson. A modest 
garden and a country rectory, the narrow 
horizon of a garret, contain for those who 
know how to look and to wait, more in- 
struction than a library, even than that of 
Mon oncle.2 Yes, we are too busy, too 
encumbered, too much occupied, too active ! 
We read toomuch! Theone thing needful 
is to throw off all one’s load of cares, of 
preoccupations, of pedantry, and to become 
again young, simple, child-like, living hap- 
pily and gratefully in the present hour. 
We must know how to put occupation aside, 
which does not mean that we must be idle. 
In an inaction which is meditative and 
attentive, the wrinkles of the soul are 
smoothed away, and the soul itself spreads, 


§2 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


unfolds, and springs afresh, and, like the 
trodden grass of the roadside or the bruised 
leaf of a plant, repairs its injuries, becomes 
new, spontaneous, true, and original. Rev- 
erie, like the rain of night, restores colour 
and force to thoughts which have been 
blanched and wearied by the heat of the 
day. With gentle fertilising power it 
awakens within us a thousand sleeping 
germs, and, as though in play, gathers 
round us materials for the future, and 
images for the use of talent. Reverie is the 
Sunday of thought ; and who knows which 
is the more important and fruitful for man, 
the laborious tension of the week, or the 
life-giving repose of the Sabbath? The 
flanerie so exquisitely glorified and sung by 
Topffer is not only delicious, but useful. 
It is like a bath which gives vigour and 
suppleness to the whole being, to the mind 
as to the body ; it is the sign and festival 
of liberty, a joyous and wholesome ban- 
quet, the banquet of the butterfly wander- 
ing from flower to flower over the hills and 
in the fields. And remember, the soul too 
is a butterfly. 


2d May 1852 (Sunday), Lancy. — This 
morning read the Epistle of St. James, the 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 53 


exegetical volume of Cellérier® on this 
Epistle, and a great deal of Pascal, after 
having first of all passed more than an hour 
in the garden with the children. I made 
them closely examine the flowers, the 
shrubs, the grasshoppers, the snails, in 
order to practise them in observation, in 
wonder, in kindness. 

How enormously important are these 
first conversations of childhood! I felt it 
this morning with a sort of religious terror. 
Innocefice and childhood are sacred. The 
sower who casts in the seed, the father or 
mother casting in the fruitful word, are 
accomplishing a pontifical act and ought to 
perform it with religious awe, with prayer 
and gravity, for they are labouring at the 
kingdom of God. All seed-sowing is a 
mysterious thing, whether the seed fall into 
the earth or into souls. Man is a husband- 
man; his whole work rightly understood is 
to develop life, to sow it everywhere. Such 
is the mission of humanity, and of this 
divine mission the great instrument is 
speech. We forget too often that language 
is both a seed-sowing and a revelation. 
The influence of a word in season, is it not 
incalculable ? What a mystery is speech ! 
But we are blind to it, because we are 


54 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


carnal and earthy. We see the stones and 
the trees by the road, the furniture of our 
houses, all that is palpable and material. 
We have no eyes for the invisible phalanxes 
of ideas which people the air and hover 
incessantly around each one of us. 

Every life is a profession of faith, and 
exercises an inevitable and silent propa- 
ganda. As far as lies in its power, it tends 
to transform the universe and humanity 
into its own image. Thus we have all a 
cure of souls. Every man is a centre of 
perpetual radiation like a luminous body ; 
‘he is, as it were, a beacon which entices a 
ship upon the rocks if it does not guide it 
into port. Every man is a priest, even in- 
voluntarily ; his conduct is an unspoken 
sermon, which is for ever preaching to 
others ;—but there are priests of Baal, of 
Moloch, and of all the false gods. Such is 
the high importance of example. Thence 
comes the terrible responsibility which 
weighs upon us all. An evil example is a 
spiritual poison: it is the proclamation of a 
sacrilegious faith, of an impure God. Sin 
would be only an evil for him who commits 
it, were it not a crime towards the weak 
brethren, whom it corrupts. Therefore it 
has been said: ‘It were better for a man 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 55 


not to have been born than to offend one of 
these little ones.’ 


6th May 1852. —It is women who, like 
mountain flowers, mark with most charac- 
teristic precision the gradation of social 
zones. The hierarchy of classes is plainly 
visible amongst them ; it is blurred in the 
other sex. With women this hierarchy has 
the average regularity of nature ; among men 
we see it broken by the incalculable varieties 
of human freedom. The reason is that 
the man, on the whole, makes himself by 
his own activity, and that the woman is, 
on the whole, made by her situation ; ‘that 
the one modifies and shapes circumstance 
by his own energy, while the gentleness of 
the other is dominated by and reflects cir- 
cumstance ; so that woman, so to speak, 
inclines to be species, and man to be 
individual. 

Thus—which is curious—women are 
at once the sex which is most constant and 
most variable. Most constant from the 
moral point of view, most variable from the 
social. A confraternity in the first case, 
a hierarchy in the second. All degrees of 
culture and all conditions of society are 
clearly marked in their outward appear- 


56 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


ance, their manners, and their tastes; but 
the inward fraternity is traceable in their 
feelings, their instincts, and their desires. 
The feminine sex represents at the same 
time natural and historical inequality ; it 
maintains the unity of the species and 
marks off the categories of society, it brings 
together and divides, it gathers and sepa- 
rates, it makes castes and breaks through 
them, according as it interprets its twofold 
role in the one sense or the other. At 
bottom, woman’s mission is essentially 
conservative, but she is a conservative with- 
out discrimination. On the one side, she 
maintains God’s work in man —all that is 
lasting, noble, and truly human in the race, 
poetry, religion, virtue, tenderness. On 
the other, she maintains the results of cir- 
cumstance —all that is passing, local, and 
artificial in society; that is to say, cus- 
toms, absurdities, prejudices, littlenesses. 
She surrounds with the same respectful 
and tenacious faith the serious and the 
frivolous, the good and the bad. Well— 
what then? Isolate—if you can— the 
fire from its smoke. It is a divine law that 
you are tracing, and therefore good. The 
woman preserves ; she is tradition as the 
man is progress. And if there is no family 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 57 


and no humanity without the two sexes, 
without these two forces there is no 
history. 


14th May 1862 (Lancy).— Yesterday I 
was full of the philosophy of joy, of youth, 
of the spring which smiles and the roses 
which intoxicate ; I preached the doctrine 
of strength, and I forgot that, tried and 
afflicted like the two friends with whom 
I was walking, I should probably have 
reasoned and felt as they did. 

Our systems, it has been said, are the 
expression of our character, or the theory 
of our situation, that is to say, we like 
to think of what has been given as havy- 
ing been acquired, we take our nature 
for our own work, and our lot in life for 
our own conquest—an illusion born of 
vanity and also of the craving for liberty. 
We are unwilling to be the product of cir- 
cumstances, or the mere expansion of an 
inner germ, And yet we have received 
everything, and the part which is really 
ours is small indeed, for it is mostly made 
up of negation, resistance, faults. We 
receive everything, both life and happi- 
ness ; but the manner in which we receive, 
this is what is still ours. Let us, then, 


58 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


receive trustfully without shame or anx- 
iety. Let us humbly accept from God 
even our own nature, and treat it char- 
itably, firmly, intelligently. Not that we 
are called upon to accept the evil and the 
disease in us, but let us accept ourselves in 
spite of the evil and the disease. And let 
us never be afraid of innocent joy; God is 
good, and what He does is well done ;— 
resign yourself to everything, even to happi- 
ness ; ask for the spirit of sacrifice, of de- 
tachment, of renunciation, and, above all, 
for the spirit of joy and gratitude —that 
genuine and religious optimism which sees 
in God a father, and asks no pardon for 
His benefits. We must dare to be happy, 
and dare to confess it, regarding ourselves 
always as the depositaries, not as the 
authors of our own joy. 


. . . This evening I saw the first glow- 
worm of the season in the turf beside the 
little winding road which descends from 
Lancy towards the town. It was crawling 
furtively under the grass, like a timid 
thought or a dawning talent. 


17th June 1852. — Every despotism has a 
specially keen and hostile instinct for what- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 59 


ever keeps up human dignity and inde- 
_pendence. And it is curious to see scien- 
tific and realist teaching used every where as 
a means of stifling all freedom of investiga- 
tion as addressed to moral questions, under 
a dead weight of facts. Materialism is the 
auxiliary doctrine of every tyranny, whether 
of the one or of the masses. To crush what 
is spiritual, moral, human —so to speak — 
in man, by specialising him ; to form mere 
wheels of the great social machine, instead 
of perfect individuals ; to make society and 
‘not conscience the centre of life, to enslave 
the soul to things, to de-personalise man, 
—this is the dominant drift of our epoch. 
Everywhere you may see a tendency to 
substitute the laws of dead matter (number, 
mass) for the laws of the moral nature 
(persuasion, adhesion, faith) ; equality, the 
principle of mediocrity, becoming a dogma ; 
unity aimed at through uniformity ; num- 
bers doing duty for argument; negative 
liberty, which has no law in itself, and 
recognises no limit except in force, every- 
where taking the place of positive liberty, 
which means action guided by an inner law 
and curbed by a moral authority. Socialism 
versus individualism: this is how Vinet put 
the dilemma. I should say rather that it is 


60 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


only the eternal antagonism between letter 
and spirit, between form and matter, be- 
tween the outward and the inward, appear- 
ance and reality, which is always present 
in every conception and in all ideas. 

Materialism coarsens and petrifies every- 
thing ; makes everything vulgar and every 
truth false. And there is a religious and 
political materialism which spoils all that 
it touches — liberty, equality, individuality. 
So that there are two ways of understand- 
ing democracy. .. . 

What is threatened to-day is moral liberty, 
conscience, respect for the soul, the very 
nobility of man. To defend the soul, its 
interests, its rights, its dignity, is the most 
pressing duty for whoever sees the danger. 
What the writer, the teacher, the pastor, 
the philosopher, has to do, is to defend 
humanity in man. Man! the true man, 
the ideal man! Such should be their motto, 
their rallying cry. War to all that debases, 
diminishes, hinders, and degrades him; 
protection for all that fortifies, ennobles, 
and raises him. The test of every religious, 
political, or educational system, is the man 
which it forms. If a system injures the 
intelligence it is bad. If it injures the 
character it is vicious. If it injures 
the conscience it is criminal. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 61 


12th August 1852 (Lancy).— Each sphere 
of being tends towards a higher sphere, and 
has already revelations and presentiments 
of it. The ideal under all its forms is the 
anticipation and the prophetic vision of 
that existence, higher than his own, toward 
which every being perpetually aspires. And 
this higher and more dignified existence is 
more inward in character — that is to say, 
more spiritual. Just as volcanoes reveal to 
us the secrets of the interior of the globe, 
so enthusiasm and ecstasy are the passing 
explosions of this inner world of the soul; 
and human life is but the preparation and 
the means of approach to this spiritual life. 
The degrees of initiation are innumerable. 
Watch, then, disciple of life, watch and 
labour towards the development of the 
angel within thee! For the divine Odyssey 
is but a series of more and more ethereal 
metamorphoses, in which each form, the 
result of what goes before, is the condition 
of those which follow. The divine life is 
a series of successive deaths, in which the 
mind throws off its imperfections and its 
symbols, and yields to the growing attrac- 
tion of the ineffable centre of gravitation, . 
the sun of intelligence and love. Created 
spirits, in the accomplishment of their 


62 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


destinies, tend, so to speak, to form con- 
stellations and milky ways within the 
empyrean of the divinity; in becoming 
gods, they surround the throne of the 
sovereign with a sparkling court. In their 
greatness lies their homage. The divinity 
with which they are invested is the noblest 
glory of God. God is the father of spirits, 
and the constitution of the eternal kingdom 
rests on the vassalship of love. 


27th September 1852 (Lancy).— To-day 
I complete my thirty-first year. . . . 

The most beautiful poem there is, is life 
—life which discerns its own story in the 
making, in which inspiration and self-con- 
sciousness go together and help each other, 
life which knows itself to be the world in 
little, a repetition in miniature of the divine 
universal poem. Yes, be man; that is to 
say, be nature, be spirit, be the image of 
God, be what is greatest, most beautiful, 
most lofty in all the spheres of being, be 
infinite will and idea, a reproduction of the 
great whole. And be everything while 
being nothing, effacing thyself, letting God 
enter into thee as the air enters an empty 
space, reducing the ego to the mere vessel 
which contains the divine essence. Be 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 63 


_ humble, devout, silent, that so thou mayest 
hear in the depths of thyself the subtle and 
profound voice ; be spiritual and pure, that 
so thou mayest have communion with the 
pure spirit. Withdraw thyself often into 
the sanctuary of thy inmost consciousness ; 
become once more point and atom, that so 
thou mayest free thyself from space, time, 
matter, temptation, dispersion, — that thou 
mayest escape thy very organs themselves 
and thine own life. That is to say, die 
often, and examine thyself in the presence 
of this death, as a preparation for the last 
death. He who can without shuddering 
confront blindness, deafness, paralysis, 
disease, betrayal, poverty; he who can 
without terror appear before the sovereign 
justice, he alone can call himself prepared 
for partial or total death. How far am I 
from anything of the sort, how far is my 
heart from any such stoicism! But at 
least we can try to detach ourselves from 
all that can be taken away from us, to ac- 
cept everything as a loan and a gift, and to 
eling only to the imperishable, — this at any 
rate we can attempt. To believe in a good 
and fatherly God, who educates us, who 
tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, who 
punishes only when he must, and takes 


64 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


away only with regret; this thought, or 
rather this conviction, gives courage and 
security. Oh, what need we have of love, 
of tenderness, of affection, of kindness, and 
how vulnerable we are, we, the sons of God, 
we, immortal and sovereign beings! Strong 
as the universe or feeble as the worm, ac- 
cording as we represent God or*only our- 
selves, as we lean upon infinite being, or as 
we stand alone. 

The point of view of religion, of a religion 
at once active and moral, spiritual and pro- 
found, alone gives to life all the dignity 
and all the energy of which it is capable. 
Religion makes invulnerable and invincible. 
Earth can only be conquered in the name 
of heaven. All good things are given over 
and above to him who desires but righteous- 
ness. ‘To be disinterested is to be strong, 
and the world is at the feet of him whom it 
cannot tempt. Why? Because spirit is 
lord of matter, and the world belongs to 
God. ‘ Be of good cheer,’ saith a heavenly 
voice, ‘I have overcome the world.’ 

Lord, lend thy strength to those who are 
weak in the flesh — but willing in the spirit ! 


31st October 1852 (Lancy). — Walked for 
half an hour in the garden. A fine rain 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 65 


was falling, and the landscape was that of 
autumn. The sky was hung with various 
shades of gray, and mists hovered about the 
distant mountains, —a melancholy nature. 
The leaves were falling on all sides like the 
last illusions of youth under the tears of 
irremediable grief. A brood of chattering 
birds were chasing each other through the 
shrubberies, and playing games among the 
branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. 
The ground strewn with leaves, brown, yel- 
low, and reddish; the trees half-stripped, 
some more, some less, and decked in ragged 
splendours of dark-red, scarlet, and yellow ; 
the reddening shrubs and plantations; a 
few flowers still lingering behind — roses, 
nasturtiums, dahlias, shedding their petals 
round them; the bare fields, the thinned 
hedges ; and the fir, the only green thing 
left, vigorous and stoical, like eternal youth 
braving decay ; —all these innumerable and 
marvellous symbols which forms, colours, 
plants, and living beings, the earth and the 
sky, yield at all times to the eye which has 
learnt to look for them, charmed and en- 
thralled me. I wielded a poetic wand, and 
“had but to touch a phenomenon to make 
it render up to me its moral significance. 
Every landscape is, as it were, a state of 


66 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


the soul, and whoever penetrates into both 

_is astonished to find how much likeness 
there is in each detail. True poetry is 
truer than science, because it is synthetic, 
and seizes at once what the combination of 
all the sciences is able at most to attain as 
a final result. The soul of nature is di- 
vined by the poet ; the man of science only 
serves to accumulate materials for its dem- 
onstration. 


6th November 1852. —I am capable of all 
the passions, for I bear them all within me. 
Like a tamer of wild beasts, I keep them 
caged and lassoed, but I sometimes hear 
them growling. I have stifled more than 
one nascent love. Why? Because with 
that prophetic certainty which belongs to 
moral intuition, I felt it lacking in true life, 
and less durable than myself. I choked it 
down in the name of the supreme affection 
to come. The loves of sense, of imagina- 
tion, of sentiment, —I have seen through 
and rejected them all; I sought the love 
which springs from the central profundities 
of being. And I still believe in it. I will 
have none of those passions of straw whicli 
dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke, I 
await, and I hope for the love which is 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 67 


great, pure, and earnest, which lives and 
works in all the fibres and through all the 
powers of the soul. And even if I go lonely 
to the end, I would rather my hope and my 
dream died with me, than that my soul 
should content itself with any meaner 
‘union. 


8th November 1852. — Responsibility is 
my invisible nightmare. To suffer through 
one’s own fault is a torment worthy of the 
lost, for so grief is envenomed by ridicule, 
and the worst ridicule of all, that which 
springs from shame of oneself. I have only 
force and energy wherewith to meet evils 
coming from outside; but an irreparable 
evil brought about by myself, a renuncia- 
tion for life of my liberty, my peace of 
mind, — the very thought of it is madden- 
ing, — I expiate my privilege indeed. My 
privilege is to be the spectator of my own 
life-drama, to be fully conscious of the 
tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more 
than that, to be in the secret of the tragi- 
comic itself —that is to say, to be unable 
to take my illusions seriously, to see my- 
self, so to speak, from the theatre on the 
stage, or to be like a man looking from be- 
yond the tomb into existence. I feel my- 


68 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


self forced to feign a particular interest in 
my individual part, while all the time I am 
living in the confidence of the poet who is 
playing with all these agents which seem so 
important, and knows all that they are 
ignorant of. It is a strange position, and 
one which becomes painful as soon as grief 
obliges me to betake myself once more to 
my own little réle, binding me closely to it, 
and warning me that I am going too far in 
imagining myself, because of my conversa- 
tions with the poet, dispensed from taking 
up again my modest part of valet in the 
piece. — Shakespeare must have experi- 
enced this feeling often, and Hamlet, I 
think, must express it somewhere. Itis a 
Doppelgdngerei, quite German in character, 
and which explains the disgust with reality, 
and the repugnance to public life, so com- 
mon among the thinkers of Germany. 
There is, as it were, a degradation, a 
Gnostic fall, in thus folding one’s wings 
and going back again into the vulgar shell 
of one’s own individuality. - Without grief, 
which is the string of this venturesome kite, 
man would soar too quickly and too high, 
and the chosen souls would be lost, for the 
race, like balloons which, save for gravita- 
tion, would never return from the empy- 
rean. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 69 


How, then, is one to recover courage 
enough for action? By striving to restore 
in oneself something of that unconscious- 
ness, spontaneity, instinct, which reconciles 
us to earth and makes man useful and rela- 
tively happy. 

By believing more practically in the 
Providence which pardons and allows of 
reparation. 

By accepting our human condition in a 
more simple and child-like spirit, fearing 
trouble less, calculating less, hoping more. 
_ For we decrease our responsibility if we 
decrease our clearness of vision, and fear 
lessens with the lessening of responsibility. 

By extracting a richer experience out of 
our losses and lessons. 


9th November 1852. — A few pages of the 
Chrestomathie Francaise and Vinet’s re- 
markable letter at the head of the volume, 
have given me one or two delightful hours. 
As a thinker, as a Christian, and as a man, 
Vinet occupies a typical place. His phi- 
losophy, his theology, his «esthetics — in 
short, his work, will be or has been already 
surpassed at all points. His was a great 
soul and a fine talent. But neither were 
well enough served by circumstances. We 


70 AMIEL’S JOURNAL: 


see in him a personality worthy of all ven- 
eration, a man of singular goodness and a 
writer of distinction, but not quite a great 
man, nor yet a great writer. Profundity 
and purity —these are what he possesses in 
a high degree, but not greatness, properly 
speaking. For that, he is a little too subtle 
and analytical, too ingenious and fine-spun ; 
his thought is overladen with detail, and 
has not enough flow, eloquence, imagina- 
tion, warmth, and largeness. Essentially 
and constantly meditative, he has not 
strength enough left to deal with what is 
outside him. The casuistries of conscience 
and of language, eternal self-suspicion, and 
self-examination — his talent lies in these 
things, and is limited by them. Vinet 
wants passion, abundance, entratnement, 
and therefore popularity. The individual- 
ism which is his title to glory is also the 
cause of his weakness. We find in him 
always the solitary and the ascetic. His 
thought is, as it were, perpetually at 
church; it is perpetually devising trials 
and penances for itself. Hence the air of 
scruple and anxiety which characterises it 
even in its bolder flights. Moral energy, 
balanced by a disquieting delicacy of fibre ; 
a fine organisation marred, so to speak, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 71 


by low health — such is the impression it 
makes upon us. Is it reproach or praise to 
say of Vinet’s mind that it seems to one a 
force perpetually reacting upon itself? A 
warmer and more self-forgetful ‘manner ; 
more muscles, as it were, around the nerves; 
more circles of intellectual and historical 
life around the individual circle — these are 
what Vinet, of all writers perhaps the one 
who makes us think most, is still lacking 
in. Less reflexivity and more plasticity — 
the eye more on the object — would raise 
the style of Vinet, so rich in substance, so 
nervous, so full of ideas and variety, into 
a grand style. Vinet, to sum up, is con- 
science personified, as man and as writer. 
Happy the literature and the society which 
is able to count at one time two or three 
like him, if not equal to him ! 


10th November 1852. — How much have 
we not to learn from the Greeks, those im- 
mortal ancestors of ours! And how much 
better they solved their problem than we 
have solved ours. Their ideal man is not 
ours, — but they understood infinitely better 
than we, how to reverence, cultivate, and 
ennoble the man whom they knew. In a 
thousand respects we are still barbarians 


72 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


beside them, as Béranger said to me with a 
sigh in 1843: — barbarians in education, in 
eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in mat- 
ters of art, etc. We must have millions of 
men in order to produce a few elect spir- 
its: a thousand was enough in Greece. If 
the measure of a civilisation is to be the 
number of perfected men that it produces, 
we are still far from this model people. 
The slaves are no longer below us, but they 
are among us. Barbarism is no longer at 
our frontiers ; it lives side by side with us. 
We carry within us much greater things 
than they, but we ourselves are smaller. 
It is a strange result. Objective civilisation 
produced great men while making no con- 
scious effort towards such a result; sub- 
jective civilisation produces a miserable and 
imperfect race, contrary to its mission and 
its earnest desire. The world grows more 
majestic but man diminishes. Why is this? 

We have too much barbarian blood in our 
veins, and we lack measure, harmony, and 
grace. Christianity, in breaking man up 
into outer and inner, the world into earth 
and heaven, hell and paradise, has decom- 
posed the human unity, in order, it is true, 
to reconstruct it more profoundly and more 
truly. But Christianity has not yet di- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 73 


gested this powerful leaven. She has not 
yet conquered the true humanity; she is 
still living under the antinomy of sin and 
grace, of here below and there above. She 
has not penetrated into the whole heart of 
Jesus. She is stillin the narthex of peni- 
tence ; she is not reconciled, and even the 
churches still wear the livery of service, and 
have none of the joy of the daughters of 
God, baptized of the Holy Spirit. 

Then, again, there is our excessive divi- 
sion of labour ; our bad and foolish educa- 
tion which does not develop the whole man ; 
and the problem of poverty. We have abol- 
ished slavery, but without having solved 
the question of labour. In law there are 
no more slaves—in fact, there are many. 
And while the majority of men are not free, 
the free man, in the true sense of the term, 
can neither be conceived nor realised. Here 
are enough causes for our inferiority. 


12th November 1852.— St. Martin’s sum- 
mer is still lingering, and the days all begin 
in mist. I ran for a quarter of an hour 
round the garden to get some warmth and 
suppleness. Nothing could be lovelier than 
the last rosebuds, or than the delicate gau- 
fred edges of the strawberry leaves em- 


74 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


broidered with hoar-frost, while above 
them Arachne’s delicate webs hung sway- 
ing in the green branches of the pines, — 
little ball-rooms for the fairies, carpeted 
with powdered pearls, and kept in place by 
a thousand dewy strands, hanging from 
above like the chains of a lamp, and sup- 
porting them from below like the anchors 
of a vessel. These little airy edifices had 
all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world, 
and all the vaporous freshness of dawn. 
They recalled to me the poetry of the north, 
wafting to me a breath. from Caledonia or 
Iceland or Sweden, Frithiof and the Edda, 
Ossian and the Hebrides. All that world 
of cold and mist, of genius and of reverie, 
where warmth comes not from the sun but 
from the heart, where man is more notice- 
able than nature, — that chaste and vigor- 
ous world, in which will plays a greater 
part than sensation, and thought has more 
power than instinct, —in short, the whole 
romantic cycle of German and northern 
poetry, awoke little by little in my memory 
and laid claim upon my sympathy. Itisa 
poetry of bracing quality, and acts upon 
one like a moral tonic. Strange charm of 
imagination! A twig of pine wood and a 
few spider-webs are enough to make’ coun- 


_AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 75 


tries, epochs, and nations live again before 
her. 


26th December 1852 (Sunday). —If I 
reject many portions of our theology and of 
our Church system, it is that I may the 
better reach the Christ himself. My phi- 
losophy allows me this. It does not state 
the dilemma as one of religion or philoso- 
phy, but as one of religion accepted or ex- 
perienced, understood or not understood. 
For me philosophy is a manner of appre- 
hending things, a mode of perception ‘of 
reality. It does not create nature, man or 
God, but it finds them and seeks to under- 
stand them. Philosophy is consciousness 
taking account of itself with all that it con- 
tains. Now consciousness may contain a 
new life —the facts of regeneration and of 
salvation, that is to say, Christian experi- 
ence. The understanding of the Christian 
consciousness is an integral part of philoso- 
phy, as the Christian consciousness is a 
leading form of religious consciousness, and 
religious consciousness an essential form of 
consciousness. 

_Anerror is the more dangerous in pro- 
portion to the degree of truth which it con- 
tains. 


76 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Look twice, if what you want is a just 
conception ; look once, if what you want is 
a sense of beauty. 


A man only understands what is akin to 
“epaaipaeg oe pee in himself. 


Conaiet: sense is the measure s of the pos- 
sible; it is composed of experience and 
prevision ; it is calculation applied to life. 


The wealth of each mind is proportional 
to the number and to the precision of its 
categories and its points of view. 


To feel himself freer than his neighbour 
is the reward of the critic. 


Modesty (pudeur) is always the sign and 
safeguard of a mystery. It is explained 
by its contrary —profanation. Shyness or 
modesty is, in truth, the half-conscious 
sense of a secret of nature or of the soul too 
intimately individual to be given or surren- 
dered. Itis exchanged. To surrender what 
is most profound and mysterious in one’s 
being and personality at any price less than 
that of absolute reciprocity is profanation. 


-AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 77 


6th January 1853.— Self-government with 
tenderness, — here you have the condition 
of all authority over children. The child 
must discover in us no passion, no weak- 
ness of which he can make use; he must 
feel himself powerless to deceive or to 
trouble us ; then he will recognise in us his 
natural superiors, and he will attach a spe- 
cial value to our kindness, because he will 
respect it. The child who can’rouse in us 
anger, or impatience, or excitement, feels 
himself stronger than we, and a child only 
respects strength. The mother should con- 
sider herself as her child’s sun, a change- 
less and ever radiant world, whither the 
small restless creature, quick at tears and 
laughter, light, fickle, passionate, full of 
storms, may come for fresh stores of light, 
warmth, and electricity, of calm and of 
courage. The mother represents goodness, 
providence, law; that is to say, the divin- 
ity, under that form of it which is accessible 
to childhood. If she is herself passionate 
she will inculcate on her child a capricious 
and despotic God, or even several discord- 
ant gods. The religion of a child depends 
on what its mother and its father are, and 
not on what they say. The inner and un- 
conscious ideal which. guides their life is 


78 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


precisely what touches the child; their 
words, their remonstrances, their punish- 
ments, their bursts of feeling even, are for 
him merely thunder and comedy; what 
they worship — this it is which his instinct 
divines and reflects. 

The child sees what we are, behind what 
we wish to be. Hence his reputation as a 
physiognomist. He extends his power as 
far as he can with each of us; he is the 
most subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously 
he passes under the influence of each per- 
son about him, and reflects it while trans- 
forming it after his own nature. He is a 
magnifying mirror. This is why the first 
principle of education is: train yourself; 
and the first rule to follow if you wish to 
possess yourself of a child’s will is: master 
your own. 


5th February 1853 (seven o'clock in the 
morning). — Iam always astonished at the ' 
difference between one’s inward mood of 
the evening and that of the morning: The 
passions which are dominant in the even- 
ing, in the morning leave the field free for 
the contemplative part of the soul. Our 
whole being, irritated and overstrung by 
the nervous excitement of the day, arrives 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 79 


in the evening at the culminating point of 
its human vitality ; the same being, tran- 
quillised by the calm of sleep, is in the 
morning nearer heaven. We should weigh 
a resolution in the two balances, and exam- 
ine an idea under the two lights, if we wish 
to minimise the chances of error by taking 
the average of our daily oscillations. Our 
inner life describes regular curves, — baro- 
metrical curves, as it were, independent of 
the accidental disturbances which the storms 
of sentiment and passion may raise in us. 
Every soul has its climate, or rather, is a 
climate ; it has, so to speak, its own meteo- 
rology in the general meteorology of the 
soul. Psychology, therefore, cannot be 
complete so long as the physiology of our 
planet is itself incomplete — that science to 
which we give nowadays the insufticient 
name of physics of the globe. 

I became conscious this morning that 
what appears to us impossible is often an 
impossibility altogether subjective. Our 
mind, under the action of the passions, 
produces by a strange mirage gigantic ob- 
‘stacles, mountains or abysses, which stop 
us short. Breathe upon the passion and 
the phantasmagoria will vanish. This power 
of mirage, by which we are able to delude 


80 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


and fascinate ourselves, is a moral phenom- 
enon worthy of attentive study. We make 
for ourselves, in truth, our own spiritual 
world, our own monsters, chimeras, angels, 
—we make objective what ferments in us. 
All is marvellous for the poet; all is divine 
for the saint; all is great for the hero; all 
is wretched, miserable, ugly, and bad for 
the base and sordid soul. The bad man 
creates around him a pandemonium, the 
artist an Olympus, the elect soul a paradise, 
which each of them sees for himself alone. 
We are all visionaries, and what we see is 
our soul in things. We reward ourselves 
and punish ourselves without knowing it, 
so that all appears to change when we 
change. 

The soul is essentially active, and the 
activity of which we are conscious is but a 
part of our activity, and voluntary activity 
is but a part of our conscious activity. 
Here we have the basis of a whole psychol- 
ogy and system of morals. Man reproduc- 
ing the world, surrounding himself with a 
nature which is the objective rendering of 
his spiritual nature, rewarding and punish- 
ing himself ; the universe identical with the 
divine nature, and the nature of the perfect 
spirit only becoming understood according 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 81 


to the measure of our perfection ; intuition 
the recompense of inward purity ; science 
as the result of goodness —in short, a new 
phenomenology, more complete and more 
moral, in which the total soul of things 
becomes spirit. This shall perhaps be my 
subject for my summer lectures. How 
much is contained in it!—the whole do- 
main of inner education, all that is myste- 
rious in our life, the relation of nature to 
spirit, of God and all other beings to man, 
the repetition in miniature of the cosmog- 
ony, mythology, theology, and history of 
the universe, the evolution of mind—in 
a word, the problem of problems into which 
I have often plunged, but from which finite 
things, details, minutiz, have turned me 
back a thousand times. I return to the 
brink of the great abyss with the clear per- 
ception that here lies the problem of sci- 
ence, that to sound it is a duty, that God 
hides Himself only in light and love, that 
He calls upon us to become spirits, to pos- 
sess ourselves and to possess Him in the 
measure of our strength, and that it is our 
incredulity, our spiritual cowardice, which 
is our infirmity and weakness. 

Dante, gazing into the three worlds with 
their divers heavens, saw under the form 


82 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


of an image what I would fain seize under 
a purer form. But he was a poet, and I 
shall only be a philosopher. The poet 
makes himself understood by human gen- 
erations and by the crowd ; the philosopher 
addresses himself only to a few rare minds. 

The day has broken. It brings with it 
dispersion of thought in action. I feel my- 
self demagnetised, pure clairvoyance gives 
place to study, and the ethereal depth of 
the heaven of contemplation vanishes before 
the glitter of finite things. Is it to be re- 
gretted ? No. But it proves that the hours 
most apt for philosophical thought are those 
which precede the dawn. 


10th February 1853. — This afternoon I 
made an excursion to the Saléve with my 
particular friends, Charles Heim, Edmond 
Scherer, Elie Lecoultre, and Ernest Naville. 
The conversation was of the most interest- 
ing kind, and prevented us from noticing 
the deep mud which hindered our walking. 
It was especially Scherer, Naville, and I 
who kept it alive. Liberty in God, the 
essence of Christianity, new publications in 
philosophy — these were our three subjects 
of conversation. The principal result for 
me was an excellent exercise mm dialectic 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 83 


and in argumentation with solid champions. 
Tf I learnt nothing, many of my ideas 
gained new confirmation, and I was able to 
penetrate more deeply into the minds of 
my friends. I am much nearer to Scherer 
than to Naville, but from him also I am in 
some degree separated. 

It is a striking fact, not unlike the chang- - 
ing of swords in Hamlet, that the abstract 
minds, those which move from ideas to 
facts, are always fighting on behalf of con- 
erete reality; while the concrete. minds, 
which move from facts to ideas, are gen- 
erally the champions of abstract notions. 
Each pretends to that over which he has 
least power; each aims instinctively at 
what he himself lacks. It is an uncon- 
scious protest against the incompleteness of 
each separate nature. We all tend towards 
that which we possess least of, and our 
point of arrival is essentially different from 
our point of departure. The Promised 
Land is the land where one is not. The 
most intellectual of natures adopts an ethical 
theory of mind ; the most moral of natures 
has an intellectual theory of morals. This 
reflection was brought home to me in the 
course of our three or four hours’ discus- 
sion. Nothing is more hidden from us than 


84 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


the illusion which lives with us day by day, 
and our greatest illusion is to believe that 
we are what we think ourselves to be. 

The mathematical intelligence and the 
historical intelligence (the two classes of 
intelligences) can never understand each 
other. When they succeed in doing so as 
to words, they differ as to the things which 
the words mean. At the bottom of every 
discussion of detail between them reappears 
the problem of the origin of ideas. If the 
problem is not present to them, there is 
confusion ; if it is present to them, there 
is separation. They only agree as to the 
goal— Truth ; but never as to the road, the 
method, and the criterion. 

Heim represented the impartiality of con- 
sciousness, Naville the morality of conscious- 
ness, Lecoultre the religion of consciousness, 
Scherer the intelligence of consciousness, 
and I the consciousness of consciousness. A 
common ground, but differing individual- 
ities. Discrimen ingeniorum. 

What charmed me most in this long dis- 
cussion was the sense of mental freedom 
which it awakened in me. To be able to 
set in motion the greatest subjects of thought 
without any sense of fatigue, to be greater 
than the world, to play with one’s strength 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 85 


—this is what makes the wellbeing of intel- 
ligence, the Olympic festival of thought. 
Habere, non haberi. There is an equal 
happiness in the sense of reciprocal confi- 
dence, of friendship, and esteem in the 
midst of conflict ; like athletes, we embrace 
each other before and after the combat, 
and the combat is but a deploying of the 
forces of free and equal men. 


20th March 1853.—I sat up alone; two 
or three times I paid a visit to the chil- 
dren’s room. It seemed to me, young 
mothers, that I understood you ! — Sleep is 
the mystery of life; there is a profound 
charm in this darkness broken by the tran- 
quil light of the night-lamp, and in this 
silence measured by the rhythmic breath- 
ings of two young sleeping creatures. It was 
brought home to me that I was looking on 
at a marvellous operation of nature, and 
I watched it in no profane spirit. I sat 
silently listening, a moved and hushed spec- 
tator of this poetry of the cradle, this ancient 
and ever new benediction of the family, 
this symbol of creation sleeping under the 
wing of God, of our consciousness with- 
drawing into the shade that it may rest 
from the burden of thought, and of the tomb, 


86 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


that divine bed, where the soul in its turn 
rests from life.—To sleep is to strain and 
purify our emotions, to deposit the mud of 
life, to calm the fever of the soul, to return 
into the bosom of maternal nature, thence 
to re-issue, healed and strong. Sleep is a 
sort of innocence and purification. Blessed 
be He who gave it to the poor sons of men 
as the sure and faithful companion of life, 
our daily healer and consoler. 


27th April 1853. —This evening I read 
the treatise by Nicole so much admired by 
Mme. de Sévigné: ‘ Des moyens de conser- 
ver la paix avec les hommes.’ Wisdom so 
gentle and so insinuating, so shrewd, pierc- 
ing, and yet humble, which divines so well 
the hidden thoughts and secrets of the 
heart, and brings them all into the sacred 
bondage of love to God and man, —how 
good and delightful a thing it is! Every- 
thing in it is smooth, even, well put to- 
gether, well thought out, — but no display, 
no tinsel, no worldly ornaments of style. 
The moralist forgets himself, and in us 
appeals only to the conscience. He be- 
comes a confessor, a friend, a counsellor. 


11th May 1853. — Psychology, poetry, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 87 


philosophy, history, and science, —I have 
swept rapidly to-day on the wings of the 
invisible hippogriff through all these spheres 
of thought. But the general impression 
has been one of tumult and anguish, temp- 
tation and disquiet. 

I love to plunge deep into the ocean of 
life ; but it is not without losing sometimes 
all sense of the axis and the pole, without 
losing myself, and feeling the conscious- 
ness of my own nature and vocation grow- 
ing faint and wavering. The whirlwind of 
the Wandering Jew carries me away, tears 
me from my little familiar enclosure, and 
makes me behold all the empires of men. 
In my voluntary abandonment to the gen- 
erality, the universal, the infinite, my par- 
ticular ego evaporates like a drop of water 
in a furnace ; it only condenses itself anew 
at the return of cold, after enthusiasm has 
died out and the sense of reality has re- 
turned. Alternate expansion and conden- 
sation, abandonment and recovery of self, 
the conquest of the world to be pursued 
on the one side, the deepening of con- 
sciousness on the other — such is the play 
of the inner life, the march of the micro- 
cosmic mind, the marriage of the individ- 
ual soul with the universal soul, the finite 


88 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


with the infinite, whence springs the intel- 
lectual progress of man. Other betrothals 
unite the soul to God, the religious con- 
sciousness with the divine ; these belong to 
the history of the will. And what pre- 
cedes will is feeling, preceded itself by in- 
stinct. Man is only what he becomes— 
profound truth ; but he becomes only what 
he is—truth still more profound. What 
am I? Terrible question! Problem of 
predestination, of birth, of liberty — there 
lies the abyss. And yet one must plunge 
into it, and I have done so. The prelude 
of Bach I heard this evening predisposed 
me to it; it paints the soul tormented and 
appealing, and finally seizing upon God, 
and possessing itself of peace and the in- 
finite with an all-prevailing fervour and 
passion. 


14th May 1853. — Third quartet concert. 
It was short. Variations for piano and 
violin by Beethoven, and two quartets, not 
more. The quartets were perfectly clear 
and easy to understand. One was by 
Mozart and the other by Beethoven, so 
that I could compare the two masters. 
Their individuality seemed to become 
plain to me: Mozart — grace, liberty, cer- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 89 


tainty, freedom, and precision of style, — 
an exquisite and aristocratic beauty, — 
serenity of soul,—the health and talent of 
the master, both on a level with his genius ; 
Beethoven — more pathetic, more passion- 
ate, more torn with feeling, more intricate, 
more profound, less perfect, more the 
slave of his genius, more carried away by 
his fancy or his passion, more moving and 
more sublime than Mozart. Mozart re- 
freshes you, like the Dialogues of Plato ; 
he respects you, reveals to you your 
strength, gives you freedom and balance. 
Beethoven seizes upon you; he is more 
tragic and oratorical, while Mozart is 
more disinterested and poetical. Mozart is 
more Greek, and Beethoven more Christian. 
One is serene, the other serious. The first 
is stronger than destiny, because he takes 
life less profoundly; the second is less 
strong, because he has dared to measure 
himself against deeper sorrows. His talent 
is not always equal to his genius, and 
pathos is his dominant feature, as perfec- 
tion is that of Mozart. In Mozart the 
balance of the whole is perfect, and art 
triumphs ; in Beethoven feeling governs 
everything, and emotion troubles his art in 
proportion as it deepens it, 


go AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


26th July 1853.— Why do I find it easier 
and more satisfactory, as a writer of verse, 
to compose in the short metres than in the 
long and serious ones? Why, in general, 
am I better fitted for what is difficult than 
for what is easy ? Always for the same 
reason. I cannot bring myself to move 
freely, to show myself without a veil, to 
act on my own account and act seriously, 
to believe in and assert myself, whereas a 
piece of badinage which diverts attention 
from myself to the thing in hand, from the 
feeling to the skill of the writer, puts me 
at my ease. It is timidity which is at the 
bottom of it. There is another reason, too, 
—lIam afraid of greatness, I am not afraid 
of ingenuity, and distrustful as I am both 
of my gift and my instrument, I like to re- 
assure myself by an elaborate practice of ex- 
ecution. All my published literary essays, 
therefore, are little else than studies, games, 
exercises, for the purpose of testing myself. 
I play scales, as it were ; I run up and down 
my instrument, I train my hand, and make 
sure of its capacity and skill. But the 
work itself remains unachieved. My effort 
expires, and, satisfied with the power to 
act, I never arrive at the will to act. I am 
always preparing and never accomplishing, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. gI 


und my energy is swallowed up in a kind 
of barren curiosity.— Timidity, then, and 
curiosity —these are the two obstacles 
which bar against me a literary career. 
Nor must procrastination be forgotten. I 
am always reserving for the future what is 
great, serious, and important, and mean- 
while I am eager to exhaust what is pretty 
and trifling. Sure of my devotion to things 
that are vast and profound, I am always 
lingering in their contraries lest I should 
neglect them. Serious at bottom, I am 
frivolous in appearance. A lover of thought, 
Iseem to care above all for expression ; I 
keep the substance for myself, and reserve 
the form for others. So that the net re- 
sult of my timidity is that I never treat the 
public seriously, and that I only show 
myself to it in what is amusing, enigmati- 
cal, or capricious ; the result of my curi- 
osity is that everything tempts me, the 
shell as well as the mountain, and that I 
lose myself in endless research ; while the 
habit of procrastination keeps me for ever 
at preliminaries and antecedents, and pro- 
duction itself is never even begun. 

But if that is the fact, the fact might be 
different. I understand myself, but I do 
not approve myself. 


92 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


lst August 1853.—I have just finished 
Pelletan’s book, Profession de foi du dix- 
neuvieme Siécle. It is a fine book. Only 
one thing is wanting to it — the idea of evil. 
It is a kind of supplement to the theory of 
Condorcet — indefinite perfectibility, man 
essentially good, life, which is a physiologi- 
cal notion, dominating virtue, duty, and 
holiness, —in short, a non-ethical concep- 
tion of history, liberty identified with na- 
ture, the natural man taken for the whole 
man. The aspirations which such a book 
represents are generous and poetical, but in 
the first place dangerous, since they lead to 
an absolute confidence in instinct; and in 
the second credulous and unpractical, for 
they set up before us a mere dream-man, 
and throw a veil over both present and past 
reality. The book is at once the plea justifi- 
catory of progress, conceived as fatal and 
irresistible, and an enthusiastic hymn to 
the triumph of humanity. It is earnest, 
but morally superficial ; poetical, but fanci- 
ful and untrue. It confounds the progress 
of the race with the progress of the indi- 
vidual, the progress of civilisation with the 
advance of the inner life. Why? Because 
its criterion is quantitative — that is to say, 
_ purely exterior (having regard to the wealth 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 93 


of life) — and not qualitative (the goodness 
of life). Always the same tendency to take 
the appearance for the thing, the form for 
the substance, the law for the essence, — 
always the same absence of moral person- 
ality, the same obtuseness of conscience, 
which has never recognised sin present in 
the will, which places evil outside of man, 
moralises from outside, and transforms to 
its own liking the whole lesson of history ! 
What is at fault is the philosophic super- 
ficiality of France, which she owes to her 
fatal notion of religion, itself due to a life 
fashioned by Catholicism and by absolute 
monarchy. 

Catholic thought cannot conceive of per- 
sonality as supreme and conscious of itself. 
Its boldness and its weakness come from 
one and the same cause —from an absence 
of the sense of responsibility, from that 
vassal state of conscience which knows only 
slavery or anarchy, which proclaims but 
does not obey the law, because the law is 
outside it, not within it. Another illusion 
is that of Quinet and Michelet, who imagine 
it possible to come out of Catholicism.with- 
out entering into any other positive form of 
religion, and whose idea is to fight Catholi- 
cism by philosophy—a philosophy which 


94 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


is, after all, Catholic at bottom, since it 
springs from anti-Catholic reaction. The 
mind and the conscience, which have been 
formed by Catholicism, are powerless to 
rise to any other form of religion. From 
Catholicism, as from Epicureanism, there is 
no return. 


11th October 1858.—My third day at 
Turin is now over. I have been able to 
penetrate farther than ever before into the 
special genius of this town and people. I 
have felt it live, have realised it little by 
little, as my intuition became more distinct. 
That is what I care for most: to seize the 
soul of things, the soul of a nation; to live 
the objective life, the life outside self; to 
find my way into a new moral country. I 
long to assume the citizenship of this un- 
known world, to enrich myself with this 
fresh form of existence, to feel it from 
within, to link myself to it, and to repro- 
duce it sympathetically, —this is the end 
and the reward of my efforts. To-day the 
problem grew clear to me as I stood on the 
terrace of the military hospital, in full view 
of the Alps, the weather fresh and clear in 
spite of a stormy sky. Such an intuition 
after all is nothing but a synthesis wrought 


_ AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 95 


by instinct—a synthesis to which every- 
thing, streets, houses, landscape, accent, 
dialect, physiognomies, history, and habits 
contribute their share. I might call it the 
ideal integration of a people, or its reduc- 
tion to the generating point, or an entering 
into its consciousness. This generating 
point explains everything else, — art, relig- 
ion, history, politics, manners ; and without 
it nothing can be explained. The ancients 
realised their consciousness in the national 
God. Modern nationalities, more compli- 
cated and less artistic, are more difficult to 
decipher. What one seeks for in them is 
the demon, the fatum, the inner genius, 
the mission, the primitive disposition — 
both what there is desire for and what 
there is power for —the force in them and 
its limitations. 

A pure and life-giving freshness of thought 
and of the spiritual life seemed to play about 
me, borne on the breeze descending from 
the Alps. I breathed an atmosphere of 
spiritual freedom, and I hailed with emo- 
tion and rapture the mountains whence was 
wafted to me this feeling of strength and 
purity. .A thousand sensations, thoughts, 
and analogies crowded upon me. History, 
too —the history of the sub-Alpine coun- 


96 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


tries, from the Ligurians to Hannibal, from 
Hannibal to Charlemagne, from Charle- 
magne to Napoleon, — passed through my 
mind. All the possible points of view were, 
so to speak, piled upon each other, and 
one caught glimpses of some concentrically 
across others. I was enjoying, and I was 
learning. Sight passed into vision without 
a trace of hallucination, and the landscape 
was my guide, my Virgil. 

All this made me very sensible of the 
difference between me and the majority of 
travellers, all of whom have a special object, 
and content themselves with one thing or 
with several, while I desire all or nothing, 
and am for ever straining towards the total, 
whether of all possible objects, or of all the 
elements present in the reality. In other 
words, what I desire is the sum of all de- 
sires, and what I seek to know is the sum 
of all different kinds of knowledge. Always. 
the complete, the absolute; the teres atque 
rotundum — sphericity — non-resignation. 


27th October 1853.—I thank Thee, my 
God, for the hour that I have just passed 
in Thy presence. Thy will was clear to 
me; I measured my faults, counted my 
griefs, and felt Thy goodness towards me. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 97 


I realised my own nothingness — Thou 
gavest me Thy peace. In bitterness there is 
sweetness ; in affliction, joy ; in submission, 
strength; in the God who punishes, the 
God who loves. To lose one’s life that one 
may gain it, to offer it that one may receive 
it, to possess nothing that one may conquer 
all, to renounce self that God may give 
Himself to us, — how impossible a problem, 
and how sublime a reality! No one truly 
knows happiness who has not suffered, and 
the redeemed are happier than the elect. 


(Same day.)— The divine miracle par 
excellence consists surely in the apotheosis 
of grief, the transfiguration of evil by good. 
The work of creation finds its consumma- 
tion, and the eternal will of the Infinite 
Mercy finds its fulfilment only in the resto- 
ration of the free creature to God and of 
an evil world to goodness, through love. 
Every soul in which conversion has taken 
place, is a symbol of the history of the 
world. To be happy, to possess eternal 
life, to be in God, to be saved, — all these 
are the same. All alike mean the solution 
of the problem, the aim of existence. And 
happiness is cumulative, as misery may be. 
An eternal growth is an unchangeable peace, 


98 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


an ever profounder depth of apprehension, 
a possession constantly more intense and 
more spiritual of the joy of heaven— this is 
happiness. Happiness has no limits, because 
God has neither bottom nor bounds, and 
because happiness is nothing but the con- 
quest of God through love. 

The centre of life is neither in thought 
nor in feeling, nor in will, nor even in con- 
sciousness, so far as it thinks, feels, or 
wishes. For moral truth may have been 
penetrated and possessed in all these ways, 
and escape us still. Deeper even than con- 
sciousness there is our being itself, our very 
substance, our nature. Only those truths 
which have entered into this last region, 
which have become ourselves, become spon- 
taneous and involuntary, instinctive and 
unconscious, are really our life — that is to 
say, something more than our property. So 
long as we are able to distinguish any space 
whatever between the truth and us we re- 
main outside it. The thought, the feeling, 
the desire, the consciousness of life, are not 
yet quite life. But peace and repose can 
nowhere be found except in life and in eter- 
nal life, and the eternal life is the divine 
life, is God. To become divine is then the 
aim of life: then only can truth be said to 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 99 


be ours beyond the possibility of loss, be- 
cause it is no longer outside us, nor even 
in us, but we are it, and it is we; we our- 
selves are a truth, a will, a work of God. 
Liberty has become nature; the creature is 
one with its creator — one through love. 
It is what it ought to be; its education is 
finished, and its final happiness begins. 
The sun of time declines and the light of 
eternal blessedness arises. 

Our fleshly hearts may call this mysti- 
cism. It is the mysticism of Jesus: ‘Iam 
one with my Father; ye shall be one with 
me. We will be one with you.’ 


Do not despise your situation ; in it you 
must act, suffer, and conquer. From every 
point on earth we are equally near to 
heaven and to the infinite. 


There are two states or conditions of 
pride. The first is one of self-approval, the 
second one of self-contempt. Pzide is seen 
probably at its purest in the last. 


It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, 
by relating that we observe, by affirming 
that we examine. hv showing that we look. 


100 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


‘by writing that we think, by pumping that 
we draw water into the well. 


lst February 1854.— A walk. The at- 
mosphere incredibly pure — a warm, caress- 
ing gentleness in the sunshine —joy in 
one’s whole being. Seated motionless upon 
a bench on the Tranchées, beside the slopes 
clothed with moss and tapestried with 
green, I passed some intense delicious mo- 
ments, allowing great elastic waves of music, 
wafted to me from a military band on the 
Terrace of St. Antoine, to surge and bound 
through me. Every way I was happy — 
as idler, as painter, as poet. Forgotten 
impressions of childhood and youth came 
back to me — all those indescribable effects 
wrought by colour, shadow, sunlight, green 
hedges, and songs of birds, upon the soul 
just opening to poetry. I became again 
young, wondering, and simple, as candour 
and ignorance are simple. I abandoned 
myself to life and to nature, and they 
cradled me with an infinite gentleness. To 
open one’s heart in purity to this ever pure 
nature, to allow this immortal life of things 
to penetrate into one’s soul, is at the same 
time to listen to the voice of God. Sensa- 
tion may be a prayer, and self-abandon- 
meni an act of devotion. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. Iol 


18th February 1854.— Everything tends 
to become fixed, solidified, and crystallised 
in this French tongue of ours, which seeks 
form and not substance, the result and not 
its formation, what is seen rather than 
what is thought, the outside rather than 
the inside. We like the accomplished end 
and not the pursuit of the end, the goal and 
not the road, in short, ideas ready-made 
and bread ready-baked,—the reverse of 
Lessing’s principle. What we look for 
above all are conclusions. This clearness 
of the ‘ready-made’ is a superficial clear- 
ness — a physical, outward, solar clearness, 
so to speak, but in the absence of a sense 
for origin and genesis, it is the clearness 
of the incomprehensible, the clearness of 
opacity, the clearness of the obscure. We 
are always trifling on the surface. Our 
temper is formal—that is to say, frivolous 
and material, or rather artistic and not 
philosophical. For what it seeks is the fig- 
ure, the fashion and manner of things, not 
their deepest life, their soul, their secret. 


16th March 1854 (From Vevay to Geneva). 
— What message had this lake for me, with 
its sad serenity, its soft and even tran- 
quillity, in which was mirrored the cold 


102 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


monotonous pallor of mountains and 
clouds? That disenchanted, disillusioned 
life may still be traversed by duty, lit by 
a memory of heaven. —I was visited by a 
clear and profound intuition of the flight 
of things, of the fatality of all life, of the 
melancholy which is below the surface of 
all existence, but also of that deepest depth 
which subsists for ever beneath the fleeting 
wave. 


17th December 1854.— When we are 
doing nothing in particular, it is then that 
we are living through all our being, and 
when we cease to add to our growth it is 
only that we may ripen and possess our- 
selves. Will is suspended, but nature and 
time are always active, and if our life is no 
longer our work, the work goes on none 
the less. With us, without us, or in spite 
of us, our existence travels through its ap- 
pointed phases, our invisible Psyche weaves 
the silk of its chrysalis, our destiny fulfils 
itself, and all the hours of life work together 
towards that flowering-time which we call 
death. This activity, then, is inevitable 
and fatal; sleep and idleness do not inter- 
rupt it, but it may become free and moral, 
a joy instead of a terror. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 103 


Nothing is more characteristic of a man 
than the manner in which he behaves to- 
wards fools. 


It “ati us a great taal of éeaubia. not to 
be of the same opinion as our self-love, and 
not to be too ready to believe in the good 
taste of those who believe in our merits. 


Does not true humility consist in accept- 
ing one’s infirmity as a trial, and one’s evil 
disposition as a cross, in sacrificing all one’s 
pretensions and ambitions, even those of 
conscience ? True humility is contentment. 


A man only understands that of which 
he has porous the woerenings | in himself. 


Ret: us ties aig this i is the Mahieu x maxim 
of art and of life, the secret of eloquence 
and of virtue, and of all moral authority. 


28th March 1855.— Not a blade of grass 
but has a story to tell, not a heart but has 
its romance, not a life which does not hide 
a secret which is either its thorn or its spur. 
Everywhere grief, hope, comedy, tragedy; 
even under the petrifaction of old age, as 


104 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


in the twisted forms of fossils, we may dis- 
cover the agitations and tortures of youth. 
This thought is the magic wand of poets 
and of preachers: it strips the scales from 
our fleshly eyes, and gives us a clear view 
into human life; it opens to the ear a 
world of unknown melodies, and makes us 
understand the thousand languages of nat- 
ure. Thwarted love makes a man poly- 
glot, and grief transforms him into a diviner 
and a sorcerer. 


16th April 1855. —TI realised this morn- 
ing the prodigious effect of climate on one’s 
state of mind. I was Italian or Spanish. 
In this blue and limpid air, and under this 
southern sun, the very walls smile at you. 
All the chestnut trees were en fete; with 
their glistening buds shining like little 
flames at the curved ends of the branches, 
they were the candelabra of the spring 
decking the festival of eternal nature. How 
young everything was, how kindly, how 
gracious !— the moist freshness of the 
grass, the transparent shadows in the court- 
yards, the strength of the old cathedral 
towers, the white edges of the roads. I felt 
myself a child; the sap of life mounted 
again into my veins as it does in plants. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 105 


How sweet a thing is a little simple enjoy- 
ment! And now, a brass band which has 
stopped in the street makes my heart leap 
as it did at eighteen. Thanks be to God; 
there have been so many weeks and months 
when I thought myself an old man. Come 
poetry, nature, youth, and love, knead my 
life again with your fairy hands; weave 
round me once more your immortal spells; 
sing your siren melodies, make me drink 
of the cup of immortality, lead me back 
to the Olympus of the soul. Or rather, no 
Paganism! God of joy and of grief, do 
with me what Thou wilt; grief is good, and 
joy is good also. Thou art leading me now 
through joy. I take it from Thy hands, 
and I give Thee thanks for it. 


17th April 1855.— The weather is still 
incredibly brilliant, warm, and clear. The 
day is full of the singing of birds, the night 
is full of stars— Nature has become all 
kindness, and it is a kindness clothed upon 
with splendour. 

For nearly two hours have I been lost in 
the contemplation of this magnificent spec- 
tacle. I felt myself in the temple of the in- 
finite, in the presence of the worlds, God’s 
guest in this vast nature. The stars wan- 


106 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


dering in the pale ether drew me far away 
from earth. What peace beyond the power 
of words, what dews of life eternal, they 
shed on the adoring soul! I felt the earth 
floating like a boat in this blue ocean. Such 
deep and tranquil delight nourishes the 
whole man —it purifies and ennobles. I 
surrendered myself, —I was all gratitude 
and docility. 


21st April 1855. —I have been reading a 
great deal: ethnography, comparative anat- 
omy, cosmical systems. I have traversed 
the universe from the deepest depths of the 
empyrean to the peristaltic movements of 
the atoms in the elementary cell. I have 
felt myself expanding in the infinite, and 
enfranchised in spirit from the bounds of 
time and space, able to trace back the 
whole boundless creation to a point with- 
out dimensions, and seeing the vast multi- 
tude of suns, of milky-ways, of stars, and 
nebulz, all existent in the point. 

And on all sides stretched mysteries, 
marvels, and prodigies, without limit, with- 
out number, and without end. I felt the 
unfathomable thought of which the Uni- 
verse is the symbol live and burn within 
me; I touched, proved, tasted, embraced 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 107 


my nothingness and my immensity ; I 
kissed the hem of the garments of God, 
and gave Him thanks for being Spirit and 
for being Life. Such moments are glimpses 
of the divine. They make one conscious 
of one’s immortality ; they bring home to 
one that an Eternity is not too much for 
the study of the thoughts and works of the 
Eternal; they awaken in us an adoring 
ecstasy and the ardent humility of love. 


23d May 1855. —Every hurtful passion 
draws us to it, as an abyss does, by a kind 
of vertigo. Feebleness of will brings about 
weakness of head, and the abyss, in spite of 
its horror, comes to fascinate us, as though 
it were a place of refuge. Terrible danger! 
For this abyss is within us; this gulf, open 
like the vast jaws of an infernal serpent 
bent on devouring us, is in the depth of our 
own being, and our liberty floats over this 
void, which is always seeking to swallow it 
up. Our only talisman lies in that concen- 
tration of moral force which we call con- 
science, that small inextinguishable flame 
of which the light is duty and the warmth 
love. ‘This little flame should be the star 
of our life ; it alone can guide our trembling 
ark across the tumult of the great waters ; 


108 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


it alone can enable us to escape the temp- 
tations of the sea, the storms and the mon- 
sters which are the offspring of night and 
the deluge. Faith in God, in a holy, mer- 
ciful, fatherly God, is the divine ray which 
kindles this flame. 

How deeply I feel the profound and ter- 
rible poetry of all these primitive terrors 
from which have issued the various the- 
ogonies of the world, and how it all grows 
clear to me, and becomes a symbol of the 
one great unchanging thought — the thought 
of God about the universe! How present 
and sensible to my inner sense is the unity 
of everything! It seems to me that I am 
able to pierce to the sublime motive which, 
in all the infinite spheres of existence, and 
through all the modes of space and time, 
every created form reproduces and sings 
within the bond of an eternal harmony. 
From the infernal shades I feel myself 
mounting towards the regions of light; my 
flight across chaos finds its rest in paradise. 
Heaven, hell, the world are within us. 
Man is the great abyss. 


27th July: 1855.— ... So life passes 
away, tossed like a boat by the waves, up 
and down, hither and thither, drenched by 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 109 


the spray, stained by the foam, now thrown 
upon the bank, now drawn back again ac- 
cording to the endless caprice of the water. 
Such, at least, is the life of the heart and 
the passions, the life which Spinoza and 
the Stoics reprove, and which is the exact 
opposite of that serene and contemplative 
life, always equable like the starlight, in 
which man lives at peace, and sees every- 
thing under its eternal aspect ; the opposite 
also of the life of conscience, in which God 
alone speaks, and all self-will surrenders 
itself to His will made manifest. 

I pass from one to another of these fhree 
existences, which are equally known to me; 
but this very mobility deprives me of the 
advantages of each. For my heart is worn 
with scruples, the soul in me cannot crush 
the needs of the heart, and the conscience 
is troubled and no longer knows how to 
distinguish, in the chaos of contradictory 
inclinations, the voice of duty or the will of 
God. The want of simple faith, the inde- 
cision which springs from distrust of self, 
tend to make all my personal life a matter 
of doubt and uncertainty. I am afraid of 
the subjective life, and recoil from every 
enterprise, demand, or promise which may 
oblige me to realise myself; I feel a terror 


IIo AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


of action, and am only at ease in the imper- 
sonal, disinterested, and objective life of 
thought. The reason seems to be timidity, 
and the timidity springs from the excessive 
development of the reflective power which 
has almost destroyed in me all spontaneity, 
impulse, and instinct—and therefore all 
boldness and confidence. Whenever Iam 
forced to act, I see cause for error and re- 
pentance every where, — everywhere hidden 
threats and masked vexations. From a 
child I have been liable to the disease of 
irony, and that it may not be altogether 
crushed by destiny, my nature seems to 
have armed itself with a caution strong 
enough to prevail against any of life’s blan- 
dishments. It is just this strength which 
is my weakness. I have a horror of being 
duped — above all, duped by myself —and 
I would rather cut myself off from all life’s 
joys than deceive or be deceived. Humili- 
ation, then, is the sorrow which I fear the 
most, and therefore it would seem as if 
pride were the deepest rooted of my faults. 
This may be logical, but it is not the 
truth: it seems to me that it is really dis- 
trust, incurable doubt of the future, a sense 
of the justice but not of the goodness of 
God — in short, unbelief, which is my mi 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. II! 


fortune and my sin. Every act is a hostage 
delivered over to avenging destiny — there 
is the instinctive belief which chills and 
freezes ; every act is a pledge confided to a 
fatherly providence —there is the belief 
which calms. 

Pain seems to me a punishment and not 
a mercy, this is why I have a secret horror 
of it. And as I feel myself vulnerable at all 
points, and everywhere accessible to pain, 
I prefer to remain motionless, like a timid 
child, who, left alone in his father’s labora- 
tory, dares not touch anything for fear of 
springs, explosions, and catastrophes, which 
may burst from every corner at the least 
movement of his inexperienced hands. I 
have trust in God directly and as revealed 
in Nature, but I have a deep distrust of all 
free and evil agents. I feel or foresee evil, 
moral and physical, as the consequence of 
every error, fault, or sin, and I am ashamed 
of pain. 

At bottom is it not a mere boundless self- 
love, the purism of perfection, an incapacity 
to accept our human condition, a tacit pro- 
test against the order of the world, which 
lies at the root of my inertia? It means 
all or nothing, a vast ambition made inac- 
tive by disgust, a yearning that cannot be 


112 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


uttered for the ideal, joined with am of- 
fended dignity and a wounded pride which 
will have nothing to say to what they con- 
sider beneath them. It springs from the 
ironical temper which refuses to take either 
self or reality seriously, because it is for 
ever comparing both with the dimly-seen 
infinite of its dreams. It is a state of men- 
tal reservation in which one lends oneself 
to circumstances for form’s sake, but re- 
fuses to recognise them in one’s heart be- 
cause one cannot see the necessity or the 
divine order in them. I am disinterested 
because I am indifferent ; I have nothing 
to say against what is, and yet I am never 
satisfied. I am too weak to conquer, and 
yet I will not be conquered,—it is the 
isolation of the disenchanted soul, which 
has put even hope away from it. 

But even this is a trial laid upon one. 
Its providential purpose is no doubt to lead 
one to that true renunciation of which 
charity is the sign and symbol. It is when 
one expects nothing more for oneself that 
one is able to love. To do good to men 
because we love them, to use every talent 
we have so as to please the Father from 
whom we hold it for His service, — there is 
no other way of reaching and curing this 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 113 


deep discontent with life, which hides itself 
under an appearance of indifference. 


4th September 1855. — In the government 
of the soul the parliamentary form succeeds 
the monarchical. Good sense, conscience, 
desire, reason, the present and the past, the 
old man and the new, prudence and gen- 
erosity, take up their parable in turn; the 
reign of argument begins; chaos replaces 
order, and darkness light. Simple will rep- 
resents the autocratic régime, interminable 
discussion the deliberative régime of the 
soul. The one is preferable from the 
theoretical point of view, the other from 
the practical. Knowledge and action are 
their two respective advantages. 

But the best of all would be to be able to 
realise three powers in the soul. Besides 
the man of counsel we want the man of 
action and the man of judgment. In me, 
reflection comes to no useful end, because 
it is for ever returning upon itself, disput- ° 
ing and debating, —I am wanting in both © 
the general who commands and the judge 
who decides. 

Analysis is dangerous if it overrules the 
synthetic faculty ; reflection is to be feared 
if it destroys our power of intuition, and 


II4 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


inquiry is fatal if it supplants faith. De- 
composition becomes deadly when it sur- 
passes in strength the combining and 
constructive energies of life, and the 
separate action of the powers of the soul 
tends to mere disintegration and destruction 
as soon as it becomes impossible to bring 
them to bear as one undivided force. When 
the sovereign abdicates anarchy begins. 

It is just here that my danger lies. Unity 
of life, of force, of action, of expression, is 
becoming impossible to me; I am legion, 
division, analysis, and reflection; the pas- 
sion for dialectic, for fine distinctions, 
absorbs and weakens me. The point which 
I have reached seems to be explained by a 
too restless search for perfection, by the 
abuse of the critical faculty, and by an 
unreasonable distrust of first impulses, first 
thoughts, first words. Unity and simplicity 
of being, confidence and spontaneity of life, 
are drifting out of my reach, and this is 
why I can no longer act. 

Give up, then, this trying to know all, to 
embrace all. Learn to limit yourself, to 
content yourself with some definite thing, 
and some definite work; dare to be what 
you are, and learn to resign -with a good 
grace all that you are not, and to believe in 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 115 


your own individuality. Self-distrust is 
destroying you: trust, surrender, abandon 
yourself ; ‘ believe and thou shalt be healed.’ © 
Unbelief is death, and depression and self- 
satire are alike unbelief. 


From the point of view of happiness, the 
problem of life is insoluble, for it is our 
highest aspirations which prevent us from 
being happy. From the point of view of 
duty, there is the same difficulty, for the 
fulfilment of duty brings peace, not happi- 
ness. It is divine love, the love of the 
holiest, the possession of God by faith, 
which solves the difficulty ; for if sacrifice 
has itself become a joy —a lasting, growing, 
and imperishable joy—the soul is then 
secure of an all-sufficient and unfailing 
nourishment, 


21st January 1856. — Yesterday seems to 
me as far off as though it were last year. 
My memory holds nothing more of the past 
than its general plan, just as my eye per- 
ceives nothing more in the starry heaven. 
It is no more possible for me to recover 
one of my days from the depths of memory 
than if it were a glass of water poured into 
a lake; it is not so much a lost thing as a 


116 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


thing melted and fused ; the individual has 
returned into the whole. The divisions of 
time are categories which have no power 
to mould my life, and leave no more lasting 
impression than lines traced by a stick in 
water. My life, my individuality, are fluid, 
—there is nothing for it but to resign 
oneself. 


9th April 1856. — How true it is that our 
destinies are decided by nothings, and that 
a small imprudence helped by some insig- 
nificant accident, as an acorn is fertilised by 
a drop of rain, may raise the tree on which 
perhaps we and others shall be crucified. 
What happens is quite different from that 
we planned; we planned a blessing, and 
there springs from it a curse. How many 
times the serpent of fatality, or rather the 
law of life, the force of things, intertwining 
itself with some very simple facts, cannot 
be cut away by any effort, and the logic of 
situations and characters leads inevitably 
to a dreaded dénouement. It is the fatal 
spell of destiny, which obliges us to feed 
our grief from our own hand, to prolong the 
existence of our vulture, to throw into the 
furnace of our punishment and expiation, 
our powers, our qualities, our very virtues, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 117 


one by one, and so forces us to recognise 
our nothingness, our dependence, and the 
implacable majesty of law. —Faith in a 
providence softens punishment, but does 
not do away with it. The wheels of the 
divine chariot crush us first of all, that 
justice may be satisfied, and an example 
given to men; and then a hand is stretched 
out to us to raise us up, or at least to 
reconcile us with the love hidden under the 
justice. Pardon cannot precede repentance, 
and repentance only begins with humility, 
And so long as any fault whatever appears 
trifling to us,—so long as we see, not so 
much the culpability of as the excuses for 
imprudence or negligence,—so long, in 
short, as Job murmurs and as providence 
is thought to be too severe,—so long as 
there is any inner protestation against fate, 
or doubt as to the perfect justice of God, — 
there is not yet entire humility or true 
repentance. It is when we accept the ex- 
piation that it can be spared us; it is when 
We submit sincerely that grace can be 
granted to us. Only when grief finds its 
work done can God dispense us from it. 
Trial then only stops when it is useless: 
that is why it scarcely ever stops. — Faitn 
in the justice and love of the Father is the 


118 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


best and indeed the only support under the 
sufferings of this life. The foundation of 
all our pain is unbelief ; we doubt whether 
what happens to us ought to happen to us ; 
we think ourselves wiser than providence, 
because, to avoid fatalism, we believe in 
accident. — Liberty in submission — what 
a problem! And yet that is what we must 
always come back to. 


7th May 1856.—I have been reading 
Rosenkrantz’s History of Poetry all 
day: it touches upon all the great names 
of Spain, Portugal, and France, as far as 
Louis XV. It is a good thing to take these 
rapid surveys; the shifting point of view 
gives a perpetual freshness to the subject 
and to the ideas presented, —a literary ex- 
perience which is always pleasant and brac- 
ing. For one of my temperament, this 
philosophic and morphological mode of 
embracing and expounding literary history 
has a strong attraction. But it is the an- 
tipodes of the French method of proceed- 
ing, which takes, as it were, only the peaks 
of the subject, links them together by theo- 
retical figures and triangulations, and then 
assumes these lines to represent the genu- 
ine face of the country. The real process 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 119 


of formation of a general opinion, of a 
public taste, of an established genre, can- 
not be laid bare by an abstract method, 
which suppresses the period of growth in 
favour of the final fruit, which prefers 
clearness of outline to fulness of state- 
ment, and sacrifices the preparation to the 
result, the multitude to the chosen type. 
This French method, however, is eminently 
characteristic, and it is linked by invisible 
ties to their respect for custom and fash- 
ion, to the Catholic and dualist instinct 
which admits two truths, two contradictory 
worlds, and accepts quite naturally what is 
magical, incomprehensible, and arbitrary 
in God, the king, or language. It is the 
philosophy of accident become habit, in- 
‘stinct, nature, and belief, — it is the religion 
of caprice. 

By one of those eternal contrasts which 
redress the balance of things, the Romance 
peoples, who excel in the practical matters 
of life, care nothing for the philosophy of 
it; while the Germans, who know very 
liccle about the practice of life, are masters 
of its theory.— Every living being seeks 
instinctively to complete itself; this is the 
secret law according to which that nation 
whose sense of life is fullest and keenest. 


120 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


drifts most readily towards a mathematical 
rigidity of theory. Matter and form are 
the eternal oppositions, and the mathemati- 
cal intellects are often attracted by the 
facts of life, just as the sensuous minds are 
often drawn towards the study of abstract 
law.— Thus, strangely enough, what we 
think we are is just what we are not: what 
we desire to be is what suits us least ; our 
theories condemn us, and our practice gives 
the lie to our theories. And the contradic- 
tion is an advantage, for it is the source of 
conflict, of movement, and therefore a con- 
dition of progress. Every life is an inward 
struggle, every struggle supposes two con- 
trary forces; nothing real is simple, and 
whatever thinks itself simple is in reality 
the farthest from simplicity. Therefore, it 
would seem that every state is a moment in 
a series; every being a compromise be- 
tween contraries. In concrete dialectic we 
have the key which opens to us the under- 
standing of beings in the series of beings, 
of states in the series of moments ; and it 
is in dynamics that we have the explana- 
tion of equilibrium. Every situation is 
an equilibrium of forces; every life is a 
struggle between opposing forces working 
within the limits of a certain equilibrium. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 121 


These two principles have been often 
clear to me, but I have never applied them 
widely or rigorously enough. 


1st July 1856. — A man, and still more a 
woman, always betrays something of his or 
her nationality. The women of Russia, 
for instance, like the lakes and rivers of 
their native country, seem to be subject to 
sudden and prolonged fits of torpor. In 
their movement, undulating and caressing 
like that of water, there is always a threat 
of unforeseen frost. The high latitude, the 
difficulty of life, the inflexibility of their 
autocratic régime, the heavy and mournful 
sky, the inexorable climate,—all these 
harsh fatalities have left their mark upon 
the Muscovite race.—A certain sombre 
obstinacy, a kind of primitive ferocity, 
a foundation of savage harshness which, 
under the influence of circumstances, might 
become implacable and pitiless; a cold 
strength, an indomitable power of resolu- 
tion which would rather wreck the whole 
world than yield, —the indestructible in- 
stinct of the barbarian tribe, perceptible 
in the half-civilised nation, — all these traits 
are visible to an attentive eye, even in the 
harmless extravagances and caprices of a 


122 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


young woman of this powerful race. Even 
in their badinage they betray something of 
that fierce and rigid nationality which burns 
its own towns and — [as Napoleon said] — 
keeps battalions of dead soldiers on their 
feet. 

What terrible rulers the Russians would 
be if ever they should spread the night of 
their rule over the countries of the south! 
They would bring us a Polar despotism, — 
tyranny such as the world has never 
known, silent as darkness, rigid as ice, 
insensible as bronze, decked with an outer 
amiability and glittering with the cold bril- 
liancy of snow,—a slavery without com- 
pensation or relief. Probably, however, 
they will gradually lose both the virtues 
and the defects of their semi-barbarism. 
The centuries as they pass will ripen these 
sons of the north, and they will enter into 
the concert of peoples in some other capac- 
ity than as a menace or a dissonance. 
They have only to transform their hard- 
ness into strength, their cunning into grace, 
their Muscovitism into humanity, to win 
love instead of inspiring aversion or fear. 


3d July 1856.—The German admires 
form, but he has no genius for it. He is 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 123 


the opposite of the Greek; he has critical 
instinct, aspiration, and desire, but no 
serene command of beauty. The south, 
more artistic, more self-satisfied, more ca- 
pable of execution, rests idly in the sense 
of its own power to achieve. On one side 
you have ideas, on the other side talent. 
The realm of Germany is beyond the 
clouds ; that of the southern peoples is on 
this earth. The Germanic race thinks and 
feels; the Southerners feel and express; 
the Anglo-Saxons will and do. To know, 
to feel, to act,—there you have the trio 
of Germany, —Italy,—England. France 
formulates, speaks, decides, and laughs. 
Thought, talent, will, speech; or, in other 
words, science, art, action, proselytism. So 
the parts of the quartet are assigned. 


2ist July 1856.— Mit Sack und Pack 
here I am back again in my town rooms. 
I have said good-bye to my friends and my 
country joys, to verdure, flowers, and hap- 
piness. Why did I leave them after all? 
The reason I gave myself was that I was 
anxious about my poor uncle, who is ill 
But at bottom are there not other reasons ? 
Yes, several. There is the fear of making 
myself a burden upon the two or three 


124 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


families of friends who show me incessant 
kindness, for which I can make no return. 
There are my books, which call me back. 
There is the wish to keep faith with myself. 
But all that would be nothing, I think, with- 
out another instinct —the instinct of the 
wandering Jew, which snatches from me 
the cup I have but just raised to my lips, 
which forbids me any prolonged enjoyment, 
and cries, ‘Go forward! Let there be no 
falling asleep, no stopping, no attaching 
yourself to this or that!’ This restless 
feeling is not the need of change. It is 
rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust 
of what charms me, the unrest of happi- 
ness. What a bizarre tendency, and what 
a strange nature |! — not to be able to enjoy 
anything simply, naively, without scruple, 
to feel a force upon one impelling one to 
leave the table, for fear the meal should 
come to an end. Contradiction and mys- 
tery !—not to use, for fear of abusing ; to 
think oneself obliged to go, not because one 
has had enough, but because one has stayed 
a while. I am indeed always the same: 
the being who wanders when he need not, 
the voluntary exile, the eternal traveller, 
the man incapable of repose, who, driven 
on by an inward voice, builds nowhere, 


— 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 125 


biys and labours nowhere, but. passes, 
looks, camps, and goes. — And is there 
not another reason for all this restless- 
ness, in a certain sense of void—of in- 
cessant pursuit of some thing wanting ? 
—of longing for a truer peace and a more 
entire satisfaction ? Neighbours, friends, 
relations, — I love them all; and so long as 
these affections are active, they leave in me 
no room for a sense of want. But yet they 
do not jill my heart; and that is why they 
haye no power to fix it. I am always wait- 
ing for the woman and the work which shall 
be capable of taking entire possession of 
my soul, and of becoming my end and aim. 


*Promenant par tout séjour 
Le deuil que tu céles, 
Psyché-papillon, un jour 
Puisses-tu trouver l’amour 
Et perdre tes ailes !’ 


I have not given away my heart: hence 
this restlessness of spirit. I will not let it 
be taken captive by that which cannot fill 
and satisfy it ; hence this instinct of pitiless 
detachment from all that charms me with- 
out permanently binding me; so that it 
seems as if my love of movement, which 
looks so like inconstancy, was at bottom 


126 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


only a perpetual search, a hope, a desire, 
and a care, the malady of the ideal. 

. . . Life indeed must. always be a com- 
promise between common sense and the 
ideal, —the one abating nothing of its de- 
mands, the other accommodating itself to 
what is practicable and real. But marriage 
by common sense !—arrived at by a bar- 
gain! Can it be anything but a profana- 
tion? On the other hand, is that not a 
vicious ideal which hinders life from com- 
pleting itself, and destroys the family in 
germ? Is there not too much of pride in 
my ideal, — pride which will not accept the 
common destiny? ... 


Noon.—I have been dreaming —my 
head in my hands. About what? About 
happiness. I have, as it were, been asleep 
on the fatherly breast of God. His will be 
done ! 


38d August 1856. —A delightful Sunday 
afternoon at Pressy. Returned late, under 
a great sky magnificently starred, with sum- 
mer lightning playing from a point behind 
the Jura. Drunk with poetry, and over- 
whelmed by sensation after sensation, I 
came back slowly, blessing the God of life, 


_ AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 127 


and plunged in the joy of the infinite. One 
thing only I lacked, a soul with whom te 
share it all—for emotion and enthusiasm 
overflowed, like water from afull cup. The 
milky way, the great black poplars, the 
ripple of the waves, the shooting stars, dis- 
tant songs, the lamp-lit town, all spoke to 
me in the language of poetry. I felt myself 
almost a poet. The wrinkles of science dis- 
appeared under the magic breath of admira- 
tion; the old elasticity of soul, trustful, 
free, and living, was mine once more. I 
was once more young, capable of self-aban- 
donment and of love. All my barrenness 
had disappeared; the heavenly dew had 
fertilised the dead and gnarled stick; it 
began to be green and flower again. My 
God, how wretched should we be without 
beauty! But with it, everything is born 
afresh in us ; the senses, the heart, imagina- 
tion, reason, will, come together like the 
dead bones of the prophet, and become one 
single and self-same energy. What is hap- 
piness if it is not this plenitude of existence, 
this close union with the universal and 
divine life? I have been happy a whole 
half day, and I have been brooding over my 
joy, steeping myself in it to the very depths 
of consciousness. 


128 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


22d October 1856.— We must learn to 
look upon life as an apprenticeship to a 
progressive renunciation, a perpetual dim- 
inution in our pretensions, our hopes, our 
powers, and our liberty. The circle grows 
narrower and narrower; we began with 
being eager to learn everything, to see 
everything, to tame and conquer every- 
thing, and in all directions we reach our 
limit—non plus ultra. Fortune, glory, 
love, power, health, happiness, long life, — 
all these blessings which have been pos- 
sessed by other men seem at first promised 
and accessible to us, and then we have to 
put the dream away from us, to withdraw 
one personal claim after another, to make 
ourselves small and humble, to submit to 
feel ourselves limited, feeble, dependent, 
ignorant, and poor, and to throw ourselves 
upon God for all, recognising our own 
worthlessness, and that we have no right to 
anything. It is in this nothingness that 
we recover something of life, —the divine 
spark is there at the bottom of it. Resig- 
nation comes to us, and, in believing love, 
we reconquer the true greatness. 


27th October 1856. —In all the chief mat- 
ters of life we are alone, and our true his- 


ie i 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 129 


tory is scarcely ever deciphered by others. 
The chief part of the drama is a monologue, 
or rather an intimate debate between God, 
our conscience, and ourselves. ‘Tears, 
griefs, depressions, disappointments, irrita- 
tions, good and eyil thoughts, decisions, 
uncertainties, deliberations, — all these be- 
long to our secret, and are almost all incom- 
municable and intransmissible, even when 
we try to speak of them, and even when we 
write them down. What is most precious 
in us never shows itself, never finds an 
issue even in the closest intimacy. Only a 
part of it reaches’ our consciousness; it 
“scarcely enters into action except in prayer, 
and is perhaps only perceived by God, for 
our past rapidly becomes strange to us. — 
Our monad may be influenced by other 
monads, but none the less does it remain 
impenetrable to them in its essence; and 
we ourselves, when all is said, remain out- 
side our own mystery. The centre of our 
consciousness is unconscious, as the kernel 
of the sun is dark. All that we are, desire, 
do, and know, is more or less superficial, 
and below the rays and lightnings of our 
periphery there remains the darkness of 
unfathomable substance. 
I was then well-advised when, in my 


130 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


theory of the inner man, I placed at the 
foundation of the Self, after the seven 
spheres which the Self contains had been 
successively disengaged, a lowest depth of 
darkness, the abyss of the Unrevealed, the 
Virtual, pledge of an infinite future —the 
obscure self, the pure subjectivity which is 
incapable of realising itself in mind, con- 
science, or reason, in the soul, the heart, 
the imagination, or the life of the senses, 
and which makes for itself attributes and 
conditions out of all these forms of its own 
life. 

But the obscure only exists that it may 
cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity 
of all victory and all progress. Whether it 
call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, 
it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty 
and the spirit. For it represents resistance 
—that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, 
the occasion for its development and its 
triumph. 


17th December 1856. — This evening was 
the second quartet concert. It stirred me 
much more than the first ; the music chosen. 
was loftier and stronger. It was the quar- 
tet in D Minor of Mozart, and the quartet 
in C Major of Beethoven, separated by a 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 131 


Spohr concerto. This last, vivid and brill- 
iant as a whole, has fire in the allegro, 
feeling in the adagio, and elegance in the 
Jinale, but it is the product of one fine gift 
in a mediocre personality. With the two 
others you are at once in contact with 
genius; you are admitted to the secrets of 
two great souls. Mozart stands for inward 
liberty, Beethoven for the power of enthu- 
siasm. The one sets us free, the other 
ravishes us out of ourselves. I do not 
think I ever: felt more distinctly than to- 
day, or with more intensity, the difference 
between these two masters. Their two 
personalities became transparent to me, and 
I seemed to read them to their depths. 

The work of. Mozart, penetrated as it is 
with mind and thought, represents a solved 
problem, a balance struck between aspira- 
tion and executive capacity, the sovereignty 
of a grace which is always mistress of itself, 
marvellous harmony and perfect unity. 
His quartet describes a day in one of those 
Attic souls who prefigure on earth the 
serenity of Elysium. ‘The first scene is a 
pleasant conversation, like that of Socrates 
on the banks of the Ilissus; its chief mark 
is an exquisite urbanity. The second scene 
is deeply pathetic. A cloud has risen in 


132 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


the blue of this Greek heaven. A storm, 
such as life inevitably brings with it, even 
in the case of great souls who love and 
esteem each other, has come to trouble the 
original harmony. What is the cause of it 
—a misunderstanding, a piece of neglect ? 
Impossible to say, but it breaks out not- 
withstanding. The andante is a scene of 
reproach and complaint, but as between 
immortals. What loftiness in complaint, 
what dignity, what feeling, what noble 
sweetness in reproach! The voice trembles 
and grows graver, but remains affectionate 
and dignified. Then, —the storm has 
passed, the sun has come back, the ex- 
planation has taken place, peace is re- 
established. The third scene paints the 
brightness of reconciliation. Love, in its 
restored confidence, and as though in sly 
self-testing, permits itself even gentle mock- 
ing and friendly badinage. And the jinale 
brings us back to that tempered gaiety 
and happy serenity, that supreme freedom, 
flower of the inner life, which is the leading 
motive of the whole composition. 

In Beethoven’s, on the other hand, a 
spirit of tragic irony paints for you the mad 
tumult of existence as it dances for ever 
above the threatening abyss of the infinite. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 133 


No more unity, no more satisfaction, no 
more serenity! We are spectators of the 
eternal duel between the two great forces, 
that of the abyss which absorbs all finite 
things, and that of life which defends and 
asserts itself, expands, and enjoys. The 
first bars break the seals and open the 
caverns of the great deep. The struggle 
begins. it is long. Life is born, and dis- 
ports itself, gay and careless as the butterfly 
which flutters above a precipice. Then it 
expands the realm of its conquests, and 
chants its successes. It founds a kingdom, 
it constructs a system of Nature. But the 
typhon rises from the yawning gulf, and 
the Titans beat upon the gates of the new 
empire. A battle of giants begins. You 
hear the tumultuous efforts of the powers 
of chaos. Life triumphs at last, but the 
victory is not final, and through all the 
intoxication of it there is a certain note of 
terror and bewilderment. The soul of 
Beethoven was a tormented soul. The 
passion and the awe of the infinite seemed 
to toss it to and fro from heaven to hell. 
Hence its vastness. Which is the greater, 
Mozart or Beethoven ? Idle question! The 
one is more perfect, the other more colossal. 
The first gives you the peace of perfect art, 


134 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


beauty at first sight. The second gives you 
sublimity, terror, pity, a beauty of second 
impression. The one gives that for which 
the other rouses a desire. Mozart has the 
classic purity of light and the blue ocean ; 
Beethoven the romantic grandeur which 
belongs to the storms of air and sea, 
and while the soul of Mozart seems to 
dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, 
that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the 
storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be 
they both! Each represents a moment of 
the ideal life, each does us good. Our love 
is due to both. 


To judge is to see clearly, to care for 
what is just and therefore to be impartial, 
— more exactly, to be disinterested, — more 
exactly still, to be impersonal. 


To do easily what is difficult for others is 
the mark of talent. To do what is impos- 
sible for talent is the mark of genius. 


Our duty is to be useful, not according to 
our desires but pene to our poner, 


If ian oualinn is Senin. ‘the wed is com- 
pulsion. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 135 


Self-interest is but the survival of the 
animal in us. Humanity only begins for 
man with self-surrender. 

The man who insists upon seeing with 
perfect clearness before he decides, never 
decides. Accept life, and you must accept 
regret. 

Without passion man is a mere latent 
force and possibility, like the flint which 
awaits the shock of the iron before it can 
give forth its “ro 


3d February 1857. — _ ‘The ihihataeranesiell 
of the soul cradles and soothes me as though 
I were an Indian Yoghi, and everything, 
even my own life, becomes to me smoke, 
shadow, vapour, and illusion. I hold so 
lightly to all phenomena that they end by 
passing over me like gleams over a land- 
scape, and are gone without leaving any 
impression. Thought is a kind of opium; 
it can intoxicate us, while still broad 
awake ; it can make transparent the moun- 
tains and everything that exists. It is by 
love only that one keeps hold upon reality, 
that one recovers one’s proper self, that 
one becomes again will, force, and individ- 


136 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


uality. Love could do everything with 
me; by myself and for myself I prefer to 
be nothing... . 

I have the imagination of regret and not 
that of hope. My clear-sightedness is ret- 
rospective, and the result with me of disin- 
terestedness and prudence is that I attach 
myself to what I have no chance of obtain- 
iNGe Loss 


27th May 1857 ( Vandeuvres").— We 
are going down to Geneva to hear the 
Tannhduser of Richard Wagner performed 
at the theatre by the German troupe now 
passing through. Wagner’s is a powerful 
mind endowed with strong poetical sensi- 
tiveness. His work is even more poetical 
than musical. The suppression of the lyri- 
eal element, and therefore of melody, is 
with him a systematic parti pris. No more 
duos or trios; monologue and the aria are 
alike done away with. There remains only 
declamation, the recitative, and the cho- 
ruses. In order to avoid the conventional 
in singing, Wagner falls into another con- 
vention —that of not singing at all. He 
subordinates the voice to articulate speech, 
and for fear lest the muse should take flight 
he clips her wings. So that his works are 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 137 


rather symphonic dramas than operas, The 
voice is brought down to the rank of an in- 
strument, put on a level with the violins, 
the hautboys, and the drums, and treated 
instrumentally. Man is deposed from his 
superior position, and the centre of gravity 
of the work passes into the baton of the 
conductor. It is music depersonalised — 
neo-Hegelian music — music multiple in- 
stead of individual. If this is so, it is in- 
deed the music of the future, the music of 
the socialist democracy replacing the art. 
which is aristocratic, heroic, or subjective. 
The overture pleased me even less than 
at the first hearing: it is like Nature before 
Man appeared. Everything in it is enor- 
mous, savage, elementary, like the murmur 
of forests and the roar of animals. It is 
forbidding and obscure, because Man — 
that is to say, mind, the key of the enigma, 
personality, the spectator —is wanting to it. 
The idea of the piece is grand. Itis 
nothing less than the struggle of passion 
and pure love, of flesh and spirit, of the 
animal and the angel in man. The music is 
always expressive, the choruses very beau- 
tiful, the orchestration skilful, but the 
whole is fatiguing and excessive, too full, 
too laborious. When all is said, it lacks 


138 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


gaiety, ease, naturalness, and vivacity — it 
has no smile, no wings. Poetically one is 
fascinated, but one’s musical enjoyment is 
hesitating, often doubtful, and one recalls 
nothing but the general impression — Wag- 
ner’s music represents the abdication of 
the Self, and the emancipation of .all the 
forces once under its rule. It is a falling 
back into Spinozism — the triumph of fatal- 
ity. This music has its root and its, ful- 
crum in two tendencies of the epoch — 
materialism and socialism — each of them 
ignoring the true value of the human per- 
sonality, and drowning it in the totality of 
Nature or of society. 


17th June 1857 ( Vandeuvres).—I have 
just followed Maine de Biran from his 
twenty-eighth to his forty-eighth year by 
means of his journal, and a crowd of 
thoughts have besieged me. Let me disen- 
gage those which concern myself. In this 
eternal self-chronicler and observer I seem 
to see myself reflected with all my faults, — 
indecision, discouragement, over-depend- 
ence on sympathy, difficulty of finishing, — 
with my habit of watching myself feel and 
live, with my growing incapacity for practi- 
cal action, with my aptitude for psychologi- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 139 


cal study. But I have also discovered 
some differences which cheer and console 
me. ‘This nature is, as it were, only one 
of the men which exist in me. It is one of 
my departments. It is not the whole of 
my territory, the whole of my inner king- 
dom. Intellectually, I am more objective 
and more constructive; my horizon is 
vaster; I have seen much more of men, 
things, countries, peoples, and books; I 
have a greater mass of experiences —in a 
word, I feel that I have more culture, 
greater wealth, range, and freedom of 
mind, in spite of my wants, my limits, and 
my weaknesses. Why does Maine de Biran 
make Will the whole of man? Perhaps 
because he had too little will. A man es- 
teems most highly what he himself lacks, 
and exaggerates what he longs to possess. 
Another, incapable of thought and medita- 
tion, would have made self-consciousness 
the supreme thing. — Only the totality of 
things has an objective value. As soon as 
one isolates a part from the whole, as soon 
as one chooses, the choice is involuntarily 
and instinctively dictated by subjective in- 
clinations which obey one‘or other of the 
two opposing laws, the attraction of simi- 
lars or the affinity of contraries. 


140 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Five o’clock.— The morning has passed 
like a dream. I went on with the journal 
of Maine de Biran down to the end of 1817. 
After dinner I passed my time with the 
birds in the open air, wandering in the 
shady walks which wind along under 
Pressy. The sun was brilliant and the air 
clear. The mid-day orchestra of Nature 
was at its best. Against the humming 
background made by a thousand invisible 
insects there rose the delicate caprices and 
improvisations of the nightingale singing 
from the ash-trees, or of the hedge-sparrows 
and the chaffinches in their nests. The 
hedges are hung with wild roses, the scent 
of the acacia still perfumes the paths; the 
light down of the poplar seeds floated in the 
air like a kind of warm, fair-weather snow. 
I felt myself as gay as a butterfly. On 
coming in I read the three first books of 
that poem Corinne, which I have not seen 
since I was a youth. Now as I read it 
again, I look at it across interposing mem- 
ories ; the romantic interest of it seems to 
me to have vanished, but not the poetical, 
pathetic, or moral interest. 


18th June.—I have just been spending 
three hours in the orchard under the shade 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. - 141 


of the hedge, combining the spectacle of a 
beautiful morning with reading and taking 
a turn between each chapter. Now the sky 
is again covered with its white veil of cloud, 
and I have come up here with Biran, whose 
-Pensées I have just finished, and Corinne, 
whom I have followed with Oswald in their 
excursions among the monuments of the 
eternal city. — Nothing is so melancholy 
and wearisome as this journal of Maine de 
Biran. This unchanging monotony of per- 
petual reflection has an enervating and 
depressing effect upon one. Here, then, is 
the life of a distinguished man seen in its 
most intimate aspects! It is one long repe- 
tition, in which the only change is an almost 
imperceptible displacement of centre in 
the writer’s manner of viewing himself. 
This thinker takes thirty years to move 
. from the Epicurean quietude to the quiet- 
ism of Fénélon, and this only speculatively, 
for his practical life remains the same, and 
all his anthropological discovery consists in 
returning to the theory of the three lives, 
lower, human, and higher, which is in Pas- 
eal and in Aristotle. And this is what they 
call a philosopher in France! Beside the 
great philosophers, how poor and narrow 
seems such an intellectual life! It is the 


142 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


journey of an ant, bounded by the limits of 
a field ; of a mole, who spends his days in 
the construction of a mole-hill. How nar- 
row and stifling the swallow who flies across 
the whole Old World, and whose sphere of 
life embraces Africa and Europe, would 
find the circle with which the mole and the 
ant are content! This volume of Biran 
produces in me a sort of asphyxia; as I 
assimilate it, it seems to paralyse me; I am 
chained to it by some spell of secret sym- 
pathy. I pity, and I am afraid of my pity, 
for I feel how near I am to the same evils 
and the same faults... . 

Ernest Naville’s introductory essay is full 
of interest, written in a serious and noble 
style; but it is almost as sad as it is ripe 
and mature. What displeases me in it a 
little is its exaggeration of the merits of 
Biran. For the rest, the small critical 4 
impatience which the volume has stirred 
in me will be gone by to-morrow. Maine, 
de Biran is an important link in the French © 
literary tradition. It is from him that our 
Swiss critics descend, Naville father and 
son, —Secrétan. He is the source of our 
best contemporary psychology, for Stapfer, 
Royer-Collard, and Cousin, called him their 
master, and Ampére, his junior by nine 
years, was his friend. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 143 


25th July 1857 ( Vandeuvres).— At ten 
o’clock this evening, under a starlit sky, 
a group of rustics under the windows of the 
salon employed themselves in shouting dis- 
agreeable songs. Why is it that this tune- 
less shrieking of false notes and scoffing 
words delights these people? Why is it 
that this ostentatious parade of ugliness, 
this jarring vulgarity and grimacing is their 
way of finding expression and expansion in 
the great solitary and tranquil night ? 

Why? Because of a sad and secret in- 
stinct. Because of the need they have of 
realising themselves as individuals, of as- 
serting themselves exclusively, egotistically, 
idolatrously — opposing the self in them to 
everything else, placing it in harsh contrast 
with the nature which enwraps us, with the 
poetry which raises us above ourselves, with 
the harmony which binds us to others, with 
the adoration which carries us towards God. 
No, no, no! Myself only, and that is 
enough! Myself by negation, by ugliness, 
by grimace and irony! Myself, in my 
caprice, in my independence, in my irre- 
sponsible sovereignty ; myself, set free by 
laughter, free as the demons are, and exult- 
ing in my freedom; I, master of myself, 
invincible and self-sufficient, living for this 


144 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


one time yet by and for myself! This is 
what seems to me at the bottom of this 
merry-making. One hears in it an echo of 
Satan, the temptation to make self the 
centre of all things, to be like an Elohim, — 
the worst and last revolt of man. It means 
also, perhaps, some rapid perception of 
what is absolute in personality, some rough 
exaltation of the subject, the individual, 
who thus claims, by abusing them, the 
rights of subjective existence. If so, it is 
the caricature of our most precious privilege, 
the parody of our apotheosis, a vulgarising 
of our highest greatness. Shout away, then, 
drunkards! Your ignoble concert, with all 
its repulsive vulgarity, still reveals to us, 
without knowing it, something of the maj- 
esty of life and the sovereign power of the 
soul. 


15th September 1857. —I have just fin- 
ished Sismondi’s journal and correspond- 
ence. Sismondi is essentially the honest 
man, conscientious, upright, respectable, the 
friend of the public good and the devoted 
upholder of a great cause, —the ameliora- 
tion of the common lot of men. Character 
and heart are the dominant elements in his 
individuality, and cordiality is the salient 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 145 


feature of his nature. Sismondi’s is a most 
encouraging example. With average facul- 
ties, very little imagination, not much taste, 
not much talent, — without subtlety of feel- 
ing, without great elevation or width or 
profundity of mind,—he yet succeeded in 
achieving a career which was almost illus- 
trious, and he has left behind him some 
sixty volumes, well known and well spoken 
of. How was this? His love for men on 
the one side, and his passion for work on 
the other, are the two factors in his fame. 
In political economy, in literary or political 
history, in personal action, Sismondi showed 
no genius—scarcely talent; but in all he 
did there was solidity, loyalty, good sense, 
and integrity. The poetical, artistic, and 
philosophic sense is deficient in him, but 
he attracts and interests us by his moral 
sense. We see in him the sincere writer, 
a man of excellent heart, a good citizen and 
warm friend, worthy and honest in the 
widest sense of the terms, not brilliant, but 
inspiring trust and confidence by his char- 
acter, his principles, and his virtues. More 
than this, he is the best type of good Gene- 
vese Liberalism, — republican but not dem- 
ocratic, Protestant but not Calvinist, human 
but not socialist, progressive but without 


146 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


any sympathy with violence. He was a 
Conservative without either egotism or hy- 
pocrisy, a patriot without narrowness. In 
his theories he was governed by experience 
and observation, and in his practice by gen- 
eral ideas. A laborious philanthropist, the 
past and the present were to him but fields 
of study, from which useful lessons might 
be gleaned. Positive and reasonable in 
temper, his mind was set upon a high aver- 
age wellbeing for human society, and his 
efforts were directed towards founding such 
a social science as might most readily pro- 
mote it. 


24th September 1857.—In the course of 
much thought yesterday about Atala and 
René, Chateaubriand became clear to me. 
I saw in him a great artist, but not a great 
man, immense talent but a still vaster pride, 
—a nature at once devoured with ambition 
and unable to find anything to love or ad- 
mire in the world except itself, — indefati- 
gable in labour and capable of everything 
except of true devotion, self-sacrifice, and 
faith. Jealous of all success, he was always 
on the opposition side, that he might be the 
better able to disavow all services received, 
and to hold aloof from any other glory but 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 147 


his own. Legitimist under the empire, a 
parliamentarian under the legitimist regime, 
republican under the constitutional mon- 
archy, defending Christianity when France 
was philosophical, and taking a distaste for 
religion as soon as it became once more a 
serious power, — the secret of these endless 
contradictions in him was simply the desire 
to reign alone like the sun, —a devouring 
thirst for applause, an incurable and insa- 
tiable vanity, which, with the true, fierce 
instinct of tyranny, would endure no brother 
near the throne. A man of magnificent 
imagination but of poor character, of in- 
disputable power, but cursed with a cold 
egotism and an incurable barrenness of feel- 
ing, which made it impossible for him to 
tolerate about him anybody but slaves or 
adorers! A tormented soul and miserable 
life, when all is said, under its aureole of 
glory and its crown of laurels! 

Essentially jealous and choleric, Chateau- 
briand from the beginning was inspired by 
mistrust, by the passion for contradicting, 
for crushing and conquering. This motive 
may always be traced in him. Rousseau 
seems to me his point of departure, the 
man who suggested to him by contrast and 
opposition all his replies and attacks. 


148 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Rousseau is revolutionary: Chateaubriand 
therefore writes his Essay on Revolutions. 
Rousseau is republican and Protestant ; 
Chateaubriand will be royalist and Catho- 
lic. Rousseau is bourgeois ; Chateaubriand 
will glorify nothing but noble birth, honour, 
chivalry, and deeds of arms. Rousseau 
conquered Nature for French letters, above 
all the Nature of the mountains and of the 
Swiss and Savoy, and lakes. He pleaded 
for her against civilisation. Chateaubriand 
will take possession of a new and colossal 
Nature, of the ocean, of America; but he 
will make his savages speak the language 
of Louis XIV., he will bow Atala before a 
Catholic missionary, and sanctify passions 
born on the banks of the Mississippi by 
the solemnities of Catholic’ ceremonial. 
Rousseau was the apologist of reverie; 
Chateaubriand will build the monument 
of it in order to break it in René. Rous- 
seau preaches Deism with all his eloquence 
in the Vicaire Savoyard; Chateaubriand 
surrounds the Roman creed with all the 
garlands of his poetry in the Génie du 
Christianisme. Rousseau appeals to natu- 
ral law and pleads for the future of nations ; 
Chateaubriand will only sing the glories of 
the past, the ashes of history, and the noble 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 149 


ruins of empires. Always a réle to be filled, 

cleverness to be displayed, a parti-pris to 

be upheld and fame to be won, —his theme, . 
one of imagination, his faith one to order, 

—pbut sincerity, loyalty, candour, seldom 

ornever! Always a real indifference simu- 
lating a passion for truth ; always an impe- 

rious thirst for glory instead of devotion 

to the good; always the ambitious artist, 

never the citizen, the believer, the man. 

Chateaubriand posed all his life as the 

wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon a 
pigmy world, and contemptuously affecting 
to desire nothing from it, though at the 

same time wishing it to be believed that he 

could if he pleased possess himself of every- 
thing by mere force of genius. He is the 

type of an untoward race, and the father 
of a disagreeable lineage. 

But to return to the two episodes. René 
seems to me very superior to Atala. Both 
the stories show a talent of the first rank, 
but of the two the beauty of Atala is of 
the more transitory kind. The attempt to 
render in the style of Versailles the loves 
of a Natchez and a Seminole, and to de- 
scribe the manners of the adorers of the 
Manitous in the tone of Catholic sentiment, 
was an attempt too violent to succeed. But 


150 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


the work is a tour de force of style, and it 
was only by the polished classicism of the 
form, that the romantic matter of the senti- 
ments and the descriptions could have been 
imported into the colourless literature of 
the empire. Atala is already old-fash- 
ioned and theatrical in all the parts which 
are not descriptive or European —that is 
to say, throughout all the sentimental sav- 
agery. 

René is infinitely more durable. Its 
theme, which is the malady of a whole gen- 
eration, — distaste for life brought about by 
idle reverie and the ravages of a vague and 
unmeasured ambition, —is true to reality. 
Without knowing or wishing it, Chiteau- 
briand has been sincere, for René is himself. 
This little sketch is in every respect a 
masterpiece. It is not, like Atala, spoilt 
artistically by intentions alien to the sub- 
ject, by being made the means of expression 
of a particular tendency. Instead of tak- 
ing a passion for René, indeed, future gen- 
erations will scorn and wonder at him ; 
instead of a hero they will see in him a 
pathological case ; but the work itself, like 
. the Sphinx, will endure. A work of art 
will bear all kinds of interpretations ; each 
in turn finds a basis in it, while the work 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 151 


itself, because it represents an idea, and 
therefore partakes of the richness and com- 
plexity which belong to ideas, suffices for 
all and survives all. <A portrait proves 
whatever one asks of it. Even in its forms 
of style, in the disdainful generality of the 
terms in which the story is told, in the 
terseness of the sentences, in the sequence 
of the images and of the pictures, traced 
with classic purity and marvellous vigour, 
René maintains its monumental character. 
Carved, as it were, in material of the pres- 
ent century, with the tools of classical art, 
René is the immortal cameo of Chateau- 
briand. 

We are never more discontented with 
others than when we are discontented with 
ourselves. The consciousness of wrong- 
doing makes us irritable, and our heart in 
its cunning quarrels with what is outside 
it, in order that it may deafen the clamour 


The faculty of intellectual metamorpho- 
sis is the first and indispensable faculty of 
the critic ; without it he is not apt at under- 
standing other minds, and ought, therefore, 
if he love truth, to hold his peace. The 


152 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


conscientious critic must first criticise him- 
self; what we do not understand we have 
not the aa to spalae: 


14th pete 1858. oS Badiinbies and anxiets 
seem to be increasing upon me. Like cat- 
tle in a burning stable, I cling to what con- 
sumes me, to the solitary life which does 
me so much harm. I let myself be de- 
voured by inward suffering... . 

Yesterday, however, I struggled against 
this fatal tendency. I went out into the 
country, and the children’s caresses re- 
stored to me something of serenity and 
calm. After we had dined out of doors all 
three sang some songs and school hymns, 
which were delightful to listen to. The 
spring fairy had been scattering flowers 
over the fields with lavish hands ; —it was 
a little glimpse of Paradise. It is true, 
indeed, that the serpent too was not far 
off. Yesterday there was a robbery close 
by the house, and death had visited another 
neighbour. Sin and death lurk around 
every Eden, and sometimes within it. 
Hence the tragic beauty, the melancholy 
poetry of human destiny. Flowers, shade, 
a fine view, a sunset sky, joy, grace, feel- 
ing, abundance, and serenity, tenderness, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 153 


and song, — here you have the element of 
beauty: the dangers of the present and the 
treacheries of the future, — here is the ele- 
ment of pathos. The fashion of this world 
passeth away. Unless we have laid hold 
upon eternity, unless we take the religious 
view of life, these bright fleeting days can 
only be a subject for terror. Happiness 
should be a prayer,—and grief also. Faith 
in the moral order, in the protecting father- 
hood of God, appeared to me in all its 
serious sweetness. 


*Pense, aime, agis et souffre en Dieu, 
C’est la grande science.’ 


18th July 1858.— To-day I have been 
deeply moved by the nostalgia of happiness 
and by the appeals of memory. My old 
self, the dreams which used to haunt me in 
Germany, passionate impulses, high aspira- 
tions, all revived in me at once with unex- 
pected force. — The dread lest I should have 
missed my destiny and stifled my true nat- 
ure, lest I should have buried myself alive, 
passed through me like a shudder. Thirst 
for the unknown, passionate love of life, 
the yearning for the blue vaults of the in- 
finite and the strange worlds of the ineffa- 
ble, and that sad ecstasy which the ideal 


154 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


wakens in its beholders, — all these carried 
me away in a whirlwind of feeling that I 
cannot describe. Was it a warning, a pun- 
ishment, a temptation? Was it a secret 
protest, or a violent act of rebellion on the 
part of a nature which is unsatisfied ? — the 
last agony of happiness and of a hope that 
will not die ? 

What raised all this storm? Nothing 
but a book —the first number of the Re- 
vue Germanique. The articles of Dollfus, 
Renan, Littré, Montégut, Taillandier, by 
recalling to me some old and favourite sub- 
jects, made me forget ten wasted years, and 
carried me back*to my university life. I 
was tempted to throw off my Genevese garb 
and to set off, stick in hand, for any country 
that might offer, —stripped and poor, but 
still young, enthusiastic, and alive, full of 
ardour and of faith. 

. . . I have been dreaming alone since 
ten o’clock at the window, while the stars 
twinkled among the clouds, and the lights 
of the neighbours disappeared one by one 
in the houses round. Dreaming of what? 
Of the meaning of this tragic-comedy which 
we call life. Alas! alas! I was as melan- 
choly as the Preacher. A hundred years 
seemed to me a dream, life a breath, and 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 155 


everything a nothing. What tortures of 
mind and soul, and all that we may die in 
afew minutes! What should interest us, 
and why ? 


‘Le temps n’est rien pour l’Ame, enfant, ta vie 
est pleine, 
Et ce jour vaut cent ans, s’il te fait trouver 
Dieu.’ 


To make an object for myself, to hope, 
to struggle, seems to me more and more 
impossible and amazing. At twenty I was 
the embodiment of curiosity, elasticity, and 
spiritual ubiquity; at thirty-seven I have 
not a will, a desire, or a talent left ; the fire- 
works of my youth have left nothing but a 
handful of ashes behind them. 


183th December 1858. — Consider yourself 
a refractory pupil for whom you are re- 
sponsible as mentor and tutor. To sanctify 
sinful nature, by bringing it gradually under 
the control of the angel within us, by the 
help of a holy God, is really the whole of 
Christian pedagogy and of religious morals. 
Our work —my work — consists in taming, 
subduing, evangelising, and angelising the 
evil self; and in restoring harmony with 
the good self. Salvation lies in abandon- 


156 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


ing the evil self in principle, and in taking 
refuge with the other, the divine self, —in 
accepting with courage and prayer the task 
of living with one’s own demon, and mak- 
ing it into a less and less rebellious instru- 
ment of good. The Abel in us must labour 
for the salvation of the Cain. To under- 
take it is to be converted, and this conver- 
sion must be repeated day by day. Abel 
only redeems and touches Cain by exercis- 
ing him constantly in good works. To do 
right is in one sense an act of violence: it 
is suffering, expiation, a cross, for it means 
the conquest and enslavement of self. In 
another sense it is the apprenticeship to 
heavenly things, sweet and secret joy, con- 
tentment and peace. Sanctification implies 
perpetual martyrdom, but it is a martyrdom 
which glorifies. A crown of thorns is the 
sad eternal symbol of the life of the saints. 
The best measure of the profundity of any 
religious doctrine is given by its conception 
of sin and the cure of sin. 


A duty is no sooner divined than from 
that very moment it becomes binding upon 
us. 


Latent genius is but a presumption. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 157 


Everything that can be, is bound to come 
into being, and what never comes into 
beirg is nothing. 


14th July 1859.—TI have just read Faust 
again. Alas, every year I am fascinated 
afresh by this sombre figure, this restless 
life. It is the type of suffering towards 
which I myself gravitate, and I am always 
finding in the poem words which strike 
straight to my heart. Immortal, malign, 
accursed type! Spectre of my own con- 
science, ghost of my own torment, image 
of the ceaseless struggle of the soul which 
has not yet found its true aliment, its peace, 
its faith, — art thou not the typical example © 
of a life which feeds upon itself, because it 
has not found its God, and which, in its 
wandering flight across the worlds, carries 
within it, like a comet, an inextinguishable 
flame of desire, and an agony of incurable 
disillusion ? I also am reduced to nothing- 
ness, and I shiver on the brink of the great 
empty abysses of my inner being, stifled by 
longing for the unknown, consumed with 
the thirst for the infinite, prostrate before 
the ineffable. I also am torn sometimes 
by this blind passion for life, these des- 
perate struggles for happiness, though more 


158 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


often I am a prey to complete exhaustion 
and taciturn despair. What is the reason 
of it all? Doubt—doubt of oneself, of 
thought, of men, and of life — doubt which 
enervates the will and weakens all our 
powers, which makes us forget God and 
neglect prayer and duty —that restless and 
corrosive doubt which makes existence im- 
possible and meets all hope with satire. 


17th July 1859. — Always and everywhere 
salvation is torture, deliverance means 
death, and peace lies in sacrifice. If we 
would win our pardon, we must kiss the 
fiery crucifix. Life is a series of agonies, a 
Calvary, which we can only climb on bruised 
and aching knees. We seek distractions ; 
we wander away; we deafen and stupefy 
ourselves that we may escape the test; we 
turn away our eyes from the via dolorosa ; 
and yet there is no help for it — we must 
come back to it in the end. What we have 
to recognise is that each of us carries within 
himself his own executioner, his demon, his 
hell, in his sin ; that his sin is his idol, and 
that this idol, which seduces the desire of 
his heart, is his curse. 

Die unto sin! This great saying of 
Christianity remains still the highest theo- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 159 


retical solution of the inner life. Only in 
it is there any peace of conscience; and 
without this peace there is no peace... . 

I have just read seven chapters of the 
Gospel. Nothing calms me so much. To 
do one’s duty in love and obedience, to do 
what is right —these are the ideas which 
remain with one. To live in God and to do 
His work —this is religion, salvation, life 
eternal ; this is both the effect and the sign 
of love and of the Holy Spirit; this is the 
new man announced by Jesus, and the new 
life into which we enter by the second 
birth. To be born again is to renounce 
the old life, sin, and the natural man, and 
to take to oneself another principle of life. 
It is to exist for God with another self, an- 
other will, another love. 


9th August 1859. — Nature is forgetful: 
the world is almost more so. However 
little the individual may lend himself to it, 
oblivion soon covers him like a shroud. 
This rapid and inexorable expansion of the 
universal life, which covers, overflows, and 
swallows up all individual being, which 
effaces our existence, and annuls all mem- 
ory of us, fills me with unbearable melan- 
choly. To be born, to struggle, to disappear 


160 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


—there is the whole ephemeral drama of 
human life. Except in a few hearts, and 
not even always in one, our memory passes 
like a ripple on the water, or a breeze in 
the air. If nothing in us is immortal, what 
a small thing is life! Like a dream which 
trembles and dies at the first glimmer of 
dawn, all my past, all my present, dissolve 
in me, and fall away from my consciousness 
at the moment when it returns upon itself. 
I feel myself then stripped and empty, like 
a convalescent who remembers nothing. 
My travels, my reading, my studies, my 
projects, my hopes, have faded from my 
mind. It is a singular state. All my fac- 
ulties drop away from me like a cloak that 
one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a 
larva. I feel myself returning into a more 
elementary form. I behold my own un- 
clothing ; I forget, still more than I am 
forgotten; I pass gently into the grave 
while still living, and I feel, as it were, the 
indescribable peace of annihilation, and the 
dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious 
of the river of time passing before and in 
me, of the impalpable shadows of life gliding 
past me, but nothing breaks the cataleptic 
tranquillity which enwraps me. 

I come to understand the Buddhist trance 


uo ted 


AMIEL’s JOURNAL. 161 


of the Soufis, the kief of the Turk, the 
‘ecstasy’? of the Orientals,—and yet I 
am conscious all the time that the pleasure 
of it is deadly, that, like the use of opium 
or of haschish, it is a kind of slow suicide, 
inferior in all respects to the joys of action, 
to the sweetness of love, to the beauty of 
enthusiasm, to the sacred savour of accom- 
plished duty. 


28th November 1859. — This evening I 
heard the first lecture of Ernest Naville”? 
on The Eternal Life. It was admirably 
sure in touch, true, clear, and noble 
throughout. He proved that, whether we 
would or no, we were bound to face the 
question of another life. Beauty of char- 
acter, force of expression, depth of thought, 
were all equally visible in this extemporised 
address, which was as closely reasoned as 
a book, and can scarcely be disentangled 
from the quotations of which-it was full. 
The great room of the Casino was full to 
the doors, and one saw a fairly large num- 
ber of white heads. 


13th December 1859. —Fifth lecture on 
The Eternal Life (‘‘ The Proof of the Gos- 
pel by the Supernatural’’). The same 


162 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


talent and great eloquence ; but the orator 
does not understand that the supernatural 
must either be historically proved, or, sup- 
posing it cannot be proved, that it must 
renounce all pretensions to overstep the 
domain of faith and to encroach upon that 
of history and science. He quotes Strauss, 
Renan, Scherer, but he touches only the 
letter of them, not the spirit. Everywhere 
one sees the Cartesian dualism and a strik- 
ing want of the genetic, historical, and 
critical sense. The idea of a. living evolu- 
tion has not penetrated into the conscious- 
ness of the orator. With every intention 
of dealing with things as they are, he re- 
mains, in spite of himself, subjective and 
oratorical. There is the inconvenience of 
handling a matter polemically instead of in 
the spirit of the student. Naville’s moral 
sense is too strong for his discernment, and 
prevents him from seeing what he does not 
wish to see. In his metaphysic, will is 
placed above intelligence, and in his per- 
sonality the character is superior to the 
understanding, as one might logically ex- 
pect. And the consequence is, that he 
may prop up what is tottering, but he 
makes no conquests; he may help to pre- 
serve existing truths and beliefs, but he is 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 163 


destitute of initiative or vivifying power. 
He is a moralising but not a suggestive 
or stimulating influence. A populariser, 
apologist, and orator of the greatest merit, 
he is a Schoolman at bottom; his argu- 
ments are of the same type as those of the 
twelfth century, and he defends Protes- 
tantism in the same way in which Catholi- 
cism has been commonly defended. The 
best way of demonstrating the insufficiency 
of this point of view is to show by history 
how completely it has been superseded. 
‘The chimera of a simple and absolute 
truth is wholly Catholic and anti-historic. 
The mind of Naville is mathematical and 
his objects moral. His strength lies in 
mathematicising morals. As soon as it 
becomes a question of development, meta- 
morphosis, organisation, — as soon as he is 
brought into contact with the mobile world 


of actual life. especially of the spiritual. ° 


life, he has no longer anything serviceable 
to say. Language is for him a system of 
fixed signs; a man, a people, a book, are 
so many geometrical figures of which we 
have only to discover the properties. 


15th December. — Naville’s sixth lecture, 
—an admirable one, because it did nothing 


164 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


more than expound the Christian doctrine 
of Eternal Life. As an extempore per- 
formance, — marvellously exact, finished, 
clear, and noble, marked by a strong and 
disciplined eloquence. There was not a 
single reservation to make in the name of 
criticism, history, or philosophy. It was 
all beautiful, noble, true, and pure. It 
seems to me that Naville has improved in 
the art of speech during these latter years. 
He has always had a kind of dignified and 
didactic beauty, but he has now added to 
it the contagious cordiality and warmth 
of feeling which complete the orator; he 
moves the whole man, —beginning with 
the intellect, but finishing with the heart. 
He is now very near to the true virile elo- 
quence, and possesses one species of it in- 
deed very nearly in perfection. He has 
arrived at the complete command of the 
resources of his own nature, at an ade- 
quate and masterly expression of himself. 
Such expression is the joy and glory of the 
oratorical artist as of every other. Naville 
is rapidly becoming a model in the art of 
premeditated and self-controlled eloquence. 

There is another kind of eloauence, — 
that which seems inspired, which finds, dis- 
covers, and iliuminates by bounds and 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL, 165 


flashes, which is born in the sight of the 
audience and transports it. Such is not 
Naville’s kind. Is it better worth having ? 
I do not know. 


Every real need is stilled, and every vice 
is stimulated by satisfaction. 

Obstinacy is will asserting itself without 
being able to justify itself. It is persist- 
ence without a plausible motive. It is the 
tenacity of self-love substituted for the 
tenacity of reason or conscience. 

It is not what he has, nor even what he 
does, which directly expresses the worth of 
aman, but what he is. 

What comfort, what strength, what econ- 
omy there is in order — material order, in- 
tellectual order, moral order. To know 
where one is going and what one wishes — 
this is order ; to keep one’s word and one’s 
engagements — again order ; to have every- 
thing ready under one’s hand, to be able to 
dispose of all one’s forces, and to have all 
one’s means of whatever kind under com- 
mand — still order; to discipline one’s 
habits, one’s efforts, one’s wishes; to or- 


166 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


ganise one’s life, to distribute one’s time, 

to take the measure of one’s duties and 

make one’s rights respected; to employ 
one’s capital and resources, one’s talent 
and one’s chances profitably ; — all this be- 

longs to and is included in. the word order. 

Order means light and peace, inward liberty 

and free command over oneself; order is. 
power. Aisthetic and moral beauty con- 
sist, the first in a true perception of order, 

and the second in submission to it, and in 
the realisation of it, by, in, and around 

oneself. Order is man’s greatest need and 
his true wellbeing. 


17th April 1860. — The cloud has lifted : 
Iam better. Ihave been able to take my 
usual walk on the Treille; all the buds 
were opening and the young shoots were 
green on all the branches. The rippling of 
clear water, the merriment of birds, the 
young freshness of plants, and the noisy 
play of children, produce a strange effect 
upon an invalid. Or rather it was strange 
to me to be looking at such things with the 
eyes of a sick and dying man; it was my 
first introduction to a new phase of experi- 
ence. There is a deep sadness in it. One 
feels oneself cut off from nature, — outside 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 167 


Ler communion as it were. She is strength 
and joy and eternal health. ‘Room for 
the living,’ she cries to us; ‘do not come 
to darken my blue sky with your miser- 
ies; each has his turn: begone!’ But to 
strengthen our own courage, we must say 
to ourselves, No; it is good for the world 
to see suffering and weakness; the sight 
adds zest to the joy of the happy and the 
careless, and is rich in warning for all who 
think. Life has been lent to us, and we 
- owe it to our travelling companions to let 
them see what use we make of it to the 
end. We must show our brethren both 
how to live and how to die. These first 
summonses of illness have besides a divine 
value ; they give us glimpses behind the 
scenes of life; they teach us something of 
its awful reality and its inevitable end. 
They teach us sympathy. They warn us 
to redeem the time while it is yet day. 
They awaken in us gratitude for the bless- 
ings which are still ours, and humility for 
the gifts which are in us. So that, evils 
though they seem, they are really an appeal 
to us from on high, a touch of God’s fatherly 
scourge. 

How frail a thing is health, and what a 
thin envelope protects our life against be- 


168 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


ing swallowed up from without or disor- 
ganised from within! A breath, and the 
boat springs a leak or founders ; a nothing, 
and all is endangered ; a passing cloud, and 
all is darkness! Life is indeed a flower 
which a morning withers and the beat of a 
passing wing breaks down; it is the widow’s 
lamp, which the slightest blast of air extin- 
guishes. In order to realise the poetry 
which clings to morning roses, one needs 
to have just escaped from the claws of that 
vulture which we call illness. The founda-. 
tion and the heightening of all things is 
the graveyard. The only certainty in this 
world of vain agitations and endless anxie- 
ties, is the certainty of death, and that 
which is the foretaste and small change of 
death — pain. 

As long as we turn our eyes away from 
this implacable reality, the tragedy of life 
remains hidden from us. As soon as we 
look at it face to face, the true proportions 
of everything reappear, and existence be- 
comes solemn again. It is made clear to 
us that we have been frivolous and petu- 
lant, intractable and forgetful, —and that 
we have been wrong. 

We must die and give an account of our 
life: here in all its simplicity is the teach- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 169 


ing of sickness! ‘Do with all diligence 
what you have to do; reconcile yourself 
with the law of the universe; think of 
your duty; prepare yourself for depart- 
ure:’ such is the cry of conscience and of 
reason. 


3d May 1860.— Edgar Quinet has at- 
tempted everything: he has aimed at noth- 
ing but the greatest things; he is rich in 
ideas, a master of splendid imagery, seri- 
ous, enthusiastic, courageous, a noble 
writer. How is it then that he has not 
_ more reputation? Because he is too pure ; 
because he is too uniformly ecstatic, fan- 
tastic, inspired, — a mood which soon palls 
on Frenchmen. Because he is too single- 
‘minded, candid, theoretical, and specula- 
tive, too ready to believe in the power of 
words and of ideas, too expansive and con- 
fiding ; while at the same time he is lacking 
in the qualities which amuse clever people 
—in sarcasm, irony, cunning, and finesse. 
He is an idealist revelling in colour: a 
Platonist brandishing the thyrsus of the 
Menads. At bottom his is a mind of no 
particular country. It is in vain that he 
satirises Germany and abuses England ; 
he does not make himself any more of a 


170 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Frenchman by doing so. It is a northern 
intellect wedded to a southern imagination, 
but the marriage has not been a happy one. 
He has the disease of chronic magnilo- 
quence, of inveterate sublimity ; abstrac- 
tions for him become personified and 
colossal beings, which act or speak in ce- 
lossal fashion ; he is intoxicated with the 
Infinite. But one feels all the time that 
his creations are only individual mono- 
logues ; he cannot escape from the bounds 
of a subjective lyrism. Ideas, passions, 
anger, hopes, complaints—he himself is 
present in them all. We never have the 
delight of escaping from his magic circle, 
of seeing truth as it is, of entering into 
relation with the phenomena and the beings 
of whom he speaks, with the reality of 
things. This imprisonment of the author 
within his personality looks like conceit. 
But on the contrary, it is because the heart 
is generous that the mind is egotistical. 
It is because Quinet thinks himself so 
much of a Frenchman that he is it so little. 
These ironical compensations of destiny are 
very familiar to me: I have often observed 
them. Man is nothing but contradiction: 
the less he knows it the more dupe he is. 
— In consequence of his small capacity for 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 171 


seeing things as they are, Quinet has neither 
much accuracy nor much balance of mind. 
He recalls Victor Hugo, with much less 
artistic power but more historical sense. 
His principal gift is a great command of 
imagery and symbolism. He seems to me 
a Gorres 18 transplanted to Franche Comté, 
a sort of supernumerary prophet, with 
whom his nation hardly knows what to do, 
seeing that she loves neither enigmas nor 
ecstasy nor inflation of language, and that 
the intoxication of the tripod bores her. 

The real excellence of Quinet seems to 
me to lie in his historical works (Marniz, 
LD’ Italie, Les Rowmains), and especially in 
his studies of nationalities. He was born 
to understand these souls, at once more 
vast and more sublime than individual 
souls. 


(Later.) —I have been translating into 
verse that page of Goethe’s Faust in which 
is contained his pantheistic confession of 
faith. The translation is not bad, I think. 
But what a difference between the two 
languages in the matter of precision! It is 
like the difference between stump and grav- 
ing-tool —the one showing the effort, the 
other noting the result of the act; the one 


172 AMIEL’'S JOURNAL. 


making you feel all that is merely dreamt 
or vague, formless or vacant, the other 
determining, fixing, giving shape even to 
the indefinite; the one representing the 
cause, the force, the limbo whence things 
issue, the other the things themselves. Ger- 
man has the obscure depth of the infinite, 
French the clear brightness of the finite. 


5th May 1860.—To grow old is more 
difficult than to die, because to renounce a 
good once and for all, costs less than to 
renew the sacrifice day by day and in de- 
tail. To bear with one’s own decay, to 
accept one’s own lessening capacity, is a 
harder and rarer virtue than to face death, 
There is a halo round tragic and premature 
death ; there is but a long sadness in de- 
clining strength. But look closer: so studied, 
a resigned and religious old age will often 
move us more than the heroic ardour of 
young years. The maturity of the soul is 
worth more than the first brilliance of its 
faculties, or the plenitude of its strength, 
and the eternal in us can but profit from all 
the ravages made by time. There is com- 
fort in this thought. 


22d May 1860. —There is in me a secret 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 173 


incapacity for expressing my true feeling, 
for saying what pleases others, for bearing 
wiiness to the present, — a reserve which I 
have often noticed in myself with vexation. 
My heart never dares to speak seriously, 
either because it is ashamed of being thought 
to flatter, or afraid lest it should not find 
exactly the right expression. I am always 
trifling with the present moment. Feeling 
in me is retrospective. My refractory nat- 
ure is slow to recognise the solemnity of the 
hour in which I actually stand. An ironi- 
eal instinct, born of timidity, makes me 
pass lightly over what I have on pretence 
of waiting for some other thing at some 
other time. Fear of being carried away, 
and distrust of myself pursue me even in 
moments of emotion; by a sort of invinci- 
ble pride, I can never persuade myself to 
say to any particular instant, ‘Stay! decide 
for me; be asupreme moment! stand out 
from the monotonous depths of eternity and 
mark a unique experience in my life!’ I 
trifle, even with happiness, out of distrust 
of the future. 


27th May 1860 (Sunday).—I heard this 
morning a sermon on the Holy Spirit — 
good but insufficient. Why was I not edi- 


174 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


fied ? Because there was no unction. Why 
was there no unction? Because Christian- 
ity from this rationalistic point of view is a 
Christianity of dignity, not of humility. 
Penitence, the struggles of weakness, aus- 
terity, find no place init. The Law is ef- 
faced, holiness and mysticism evaporate ; 
the specifically Christian accent is wanting. 
My impression is always the same, — faith 
is made a dull poor thing by these attempts 
to reduce it to simple moral psychology. I 
am oppressed by a feeling of inappropriate- 
ness and malaise at the sight of philosophy 
in the pulpit. ‘They have taken away my 
Saviour, and I know not where they have 
laid Him ;’ so the simple folk have a right 
to say, and I repeat it with them. — Thus, 
while some shock me by their sacerdotal 
dogmatism, others repel me by their ration- 
alising laicism. It seems to me that good 
preaching ought to combine, as Schleier- 
macher did, perfect moral humility with 
energetic independence of thought, — a pro- 
found sense of sin with respect for criticism 
and a passion for truth. 


The free being who abandons the conduct 
of himself, yields himself to Satan; in the 
moral world there is no ground without a 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 175 


master, and the waste lands belong to the 
vil One. 


The poetry of childhood consists in simu- 
lating and forestalling the future, just as 
the poetry of mature life consists often in 
going backwards to some golden age. Poe- 
try is always in the distance. The whole 
art of moral government lies in gaining a 
directing and shaping hold over the poetical 
ideals of an age. 


9th January 1861.—I have just come 
from the inaugural lecture of Victor Cher- 
buliez in a state of bewildered admiration. 
As a lecture it was exquisite: if it was a 
recitation of prepared matter, it was admi- 
rable ; if an extempore performance, it was 
amazing. In the face of superiority and 
perfection, says Schiller, we have but one 
resource —to love them, which is what I 
have done. I had the pleasure, mingled 
with a little surprise, of feeling in myself 
no sort of jealousy towards this young con- 
queror. 


15th March. — The last lecture in Victor 
Cherbuliez’s Course on Chivalry, which is 
just over, showed the same magical power 


176 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


over his subject as that with which he began 
the series two months ago. It was a tri- 
umph and a harvest of laurels. Cervantes, 
Ignatius Loyola, and the heritage of chiv- 
alry, — that is to say, individualism, honour, 
the poetry of the present and the poetry of 
contrasts, modern liberty and progress, — 
have been the subjects of this lecture. 

The general impression left upon me all 
along has been one of admiration for the 
union in him of extraordinary skill in exe- 
cution with admirable cultivation of mind. 
With what freedom of spirit he uses and 
wields his vast erudition, and what capacity 
for close attention he must have to be able 
to carry the weight of a whole improvised 
speech with the same ease as though it 
were a single sentence! I do not know if 
I am partial, but I find no occasion for 
anything but praise in this young wizard | 
and his lectures. The fact is, that in my 
opinion we have now one more first-rate 
mind, one more master of language among 
us. This course, with the Causeries Athéni- 
ennes, seems to me to establish Victor 
Cherbuliez’s position at Geneva. 


17th March 1861.—This afternoon a 
homicidal languor seized hold upon me — 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL, 177 


disgust, weariness of life, mortal sadness. 
I wandered out into the churchyard, hoping 
to find quiet and peace there, and so to 
reconcile myself with duty. Vain dream ! 
The place of rest itself had become inhospi- 
table. Workmen were stripping and carry- 
ing away the turf, the trees were dry, the 
wind cold, the sky gray —something arid, 
irreverent, and prosaic dishonoured the 
resting-place of the dead. I was struck 
with something wanting in our national 
feeling, —respect for the dead, the poetry 
of the tomb, the piety of memory. Our 
churches are too little open; our church- 
yards too much. The result in both cases 
is the same. The tortured and trembling 
heart which seeks, outside the scene of its 
daily miseries, to find some place where it 
may pray in peace, or pour out its grief 
before God, or meditate in the presence of 
eternal things, with us has nowhere to go. 
Our Church ignores these wants of the soul 
instead of divining and meeting them. She 
shows very little compassionate care for 
her children, very little wise consideration 
for the more delicate griefs, and no intui- 
tion of the deeper mysteries of tenderness, 
no religious suavity. Under a pretext of 
spirituality we are always checking legiti- 


178 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


mate aspirations. We have lost the mysti- 
cal sense; and what is religion without 
mysticism ? — A rose without perfume. 

The words repentance and sanctification 
are always on our lips. But adoration and 
consolation are also two essential elements 
in religion, and we ought perhaps to make 
more room for them than we do. 


28th April 1861.—In the same way as a 
dream transforms, according to its nature, 
the incidents of sleep, so the soul converts 
into psychical phenomena the ill-defined 
impressions of the organism. An uncom- 
fortable attitude becomes nightmare; an 
atmosphere charged with storm becomes 
moral torment. Not mechanically and by 
direct causality ; but imagination and con- 
science engender, according to their own 
nature, analogous effects; they translate 
into their own language, and cast in their 
own mould, whatever reaches them from 
outside. Thus dreams may be helpful to 
medicine and to divination, and states of 
weather may stir up and set free within 
the soul vague and hidden evils.— The 
suggestions and solicitations which act 
upon life come from outside, but life pro- 
duces nothing but itself after all. Original- 


eel 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 179 


ity consists in rapid and clear reaction 
against these outside influences, in giving 


_to them our individual stamp. To think is 


to withdraw, as it were, into one’s impres- 
sion — to make it clear to oneself, and then 
to put it forth in the shape of a personal 
judgment. . In this also consists self-deliver- 
ance, self-enfranchisement, self-conquest. 
All that comes from outside is a question to 
which we owe an answer — a pressure to be 
met by counter-pressure, if we are to re- 
main free and living agents. The develop- 
ment of our unconscious nature follows the 
astronomical laws of Ptolemy ; everything 
in it is change —cycle, epi-cycle, and meta- 
morphosis. 

_ Every man then possesses in himself the 
analogies and rudiments of all things, of all 
beings, and of all forms of life. He who 
knows how to divine the small beginnings, 
the germs and symptoms of things, can 
retrace in himself the universal mechanism, 
and divine by intuition the series which he 
himself will not finish, such as vegetable 
and animal existences, human passions and 
crises, the diseases of the soul and those of 
the body. The mind which is subtle and 
powerful may penetrate all these potentiali- 
ties, and make every point flash out the 


180 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


world which it contains. This is to be con- 
scious of and to possess the general life, this 
is to enter into the divine sanctuary of con- | 
templation. 


12th September 1861. —In me an intel- 
lect which would fain forget itself in things, 
is contradicted by a heart which yearns to 
live in human beings. The uniting link of the 
two contradictions is the tendency towards 
self-abandonment, towards ceasing to will 
and exist for oneself, towards laying down 
one’s own personality, and losing — dissoly- 
ing —oneself in love and contemplation. 
What I lack above all things is character, 
will, individuality. But, as always hap- 
pens, the appearance is exactly the con- 
trary of the reality, and my outward life the 
reverse of my true and deepest aspiration. 
I whose whole being —heart and intellect 
— thirsts to absorb itself in reality, in its 
neighbour man, in Nature and in God, —I, 
whom solitude devours and destroys, —I 
shut myself up in solitude and seem to 
delight only in myself and to be sufficient 
for myself. Pride and delicacy of soul, 
timidity of heart, have made me thus do 
violence to all my instincts and invert the 
natural order of my life. It is not astonish- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 181 


ing that I should be unintelligible to others. 
In fact I have always avoided what at- 
tracted me, and turned my back upon the 
point where secretly I desired to be. 


‘Deux instincts sont en moi: vertige et dé- 
raison ; 
J’ai l’effroi du bonheur et la soif du poison.’ 


It is the Nemesis which dogs the steps of 
life, the secret instinct and power of death 
in us, which labours continually for the 
destruction of all that seeks to be, to take 
form, to exist ; it is the passion for destruc- 
tion, the tendency towards suicide, identi- 
fying itself with the instinct of self-preser- 
vation. —This antipathy towards all that 
does one good, all that nourishes and heals, 
is it not a mere variation of the antip- 
athy to moral light and regenerative 
truth? Does not sin also create a thirst 
for death, a growing passion for what does 
harm ?— Discouragement has been my sin. 
Discouragement is an act of unbelief. 
Growing weakness has been the conse- 
quence of it ; the principle of death in me 
and the influence of the Prince of Darkness 
have waxed stronger together. My will in 
abdicating has yielded up the sceptre to 
instinct ; and as the corruption of the best 


182 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


results in what is worst, love of the ideal, 
tenderness, unworldliness, have led me to 
a state in which I shrink from hope and 
crave for annihilation. Action is my 
cross. 


11th October 1861 (Heidelberg). — After 
eleven days’ journey, here I am under the 
roof of my friends, in their hospitak!e house 
on the banks of the Neckar, with its garden 
climbing up the side of the Heiligenberg. 
Blazing sun; my room is flooded 

with light and warmth. Sitting opposite 
the Geisberg, I write to the murmur of the 
Neckar, which rolls its green waves, flecked 
with silver, exactly beneath the balcony on 
which my room opens. A great barge com- 
ing from Heilbronn passes silently under 
my eyes, while the wheels of a cart which 
I cannot see are dimly heard on the road 
which skirts the river. Distant voices of 
children, of cocks, of chirping sparrows, 
the clock of the Church of the Holy Spirit, 
which chimes the hour, serve to gauge, 
without troubling, the general tranquillity 
of the scene. One feels the hours gently 
slipping by, and time, instead of flying, 
seems to hover. A peace beyond words 
steals into my heart,—an impression of 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 183 


morning grace, of fresh country poetry 
which brings back the sense of youth, and 
has the true German savour. ... Two 
decked barges carrying red flags, each with 
a train of flat boats filled with coal, are 
going up the river and making their way 
under the arch of the great stone bridge. 
I stand at the window and see a whole per- 
spective of boats sailing in both directions ; 
the Neckar is as animated as the street of 
some great capital; and already on the 
slope of the wooded mountain, streaked 
by the smoke-wreaths of the town, the 
castle throws its shadow like a vast drapery, 
and traces the outlines of its battlements 
and turrets. Higher up, in front of me, 
rises the dark profile of the Molkenkur ; 
higher still, in relief against the dazzling 
east, I can distinguish the misty forms of 
the two towers of the Kaiserstuhl and 
the Trutzheinrich. 

But enough of landscape. My host, \ 
Dr. George Weber, tells me that his manual 
of history is translated into Polish, Dutch, 
Spanish, Italian, and French, and that of 
his great Universal History three volumes 
are already published. What astonishing 
power of work, what prodigious tenacity, 
what solidity! O deutscher Fleiss! 


184 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


25th November 1861.— To understand a 
drama requires the same mental operation 
as to understand an existence, a biography, 
aman. It is a putting back of the bird inte 
the egg, of the plant into its seed, a recon- 
stitution of the whole genesis of the being 
in question. Art is simply the bringing 
into relief of the obscure thought of nature; 
a simplification of the lines, a falling into 
place of groups otherwise invisible. The 
fire of inspiration brings out, as it were, 
designs traced beforehand in sympathetic 
ink. The mysterious grows clear, the con- 
fused plain; what is complicated becomes 
simple — what is accidental, necessary. In 
short, art reveals nature by interpreting 
its intentions and formulating its desires, 
Every ideal is the key of a long enigma. 
The roe artist is the er 


Face man isa a tales of wild hoa and 
these wild beasts are his passions. To draw 
their teeth and claws, to muzzle and tame 
them, to turn them into servants and 
domestic animals, fuming, perhaps, but 
submissive —in this consists personal edu- 
cation. 


3d February 1862. —Self-criticism is the 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 185 


corrosive of all oratorical or literary spon- 
taneity. The thirst to know turned upon 
the self is punished, like the curiosity of 
Psyche, by the flight of the thing desired. 
Force should remain a mystery to itself; 
as soon as it tries to penetrate its own 
secret it vanishes away. The hen with the 
golden eggs becomes unfruitful as soon as 
she tries to find out why her eggs are 
golden. The consciousness of conscious- 
ness is the term and end of analysis. True, 
but analysis pushed to extremity devours 
itself, like the Egyptian serpent. We must 
give it some external matter to crush and 
disselve if we wish to prevent its destruc- 
tion by its action upon itself. ‘We are, 
and ought to be, obscure to ourselves,’ said 
Goethe, ‘turned outwards, and working 
upon the world which surrounds us.’ Out- 
ward radiation constitutes health; a too 
continuous concentration upon what is 
within brings us back to vacuity and blank. 
It is better that life should dilate and ex- 
tend itself in ever-widening circles, than 
that it should be perpetually diminished 
and compressed by solitary contraction. 
Warmth tends to make a globe out of an 
atom ; cold, to reduce a globe to the dimen- 
sions of an atom. Analysis has been to me 
self-annulling, self-destroying. 


186 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


23d April 1862 (Mornex sur Saléve).— 
I was awakened by the twittering of the 
birds at a quarter to five, and saw, as I 
threw open my windows, the yellowing 
crescent of the moon looking in upon me, 
while the east was just faintly whitening. 
An hour later it was delicious out of doors. 
The anemones were still closed, the apple- 
trees in full flower: — 


‘ Ces beaux pommiers, couverts de leurs fleurs 
étoilées, 
Neige odorante du printemps.’ 
The view was exquisite, and Nature, in full 
festival, spread freshness and joy around 
her. I breakfasted, read the paper, and 
hereIam. The ladies of the pension are 
still under the horizon. I pity them for 
the loss of two or three delightful hours. 


Eleven o’clock. — Preludes, scales, piano- 
exercises going on under my feet. In the 
garden children’s voices. I have just fin- 
ished Rosenkranz on Hegel’s Logic, and 
have run through a few articles in the Re- 
views. ... The limitation of the French 
mind consists in the insufficiency of its 
spiritual alphabet, which does not allow it 
to translate the Greek, German, or Spanish 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 187 


mind without changing the accent. The 
hospitality of French manners is not com- 
pleted by a real hospitality of thought. .. . 
My nature is just the opposite. I am indi- 
vidual in the presence of men, objective in 
the presence of things. I attach myself to 
the object, and absorb myself in it ; I detach 
myself from subjects [i.e. persons], and 
hold myself on my guard against them. I 
feel myself different from the mass of men, 
and akin to the great whole of Nature. My 
way of asserting myself is in cherishing 
this sense of sympathetic unity with life, 
which I yearn to understand, and in repu- 
diating the tyranny of commonplace. All 
that is imitative and artificial inspires me 
with a secret repulsion, while the smallest 
true and spontaneous existence (plant, 
animal, child) draws and attracts me. I 
feel myself in community of spirit with the 
Goethes, the Hegels, the Schleiermachers, 
the Leibnitzes, opposed as they are among 
themselves; while the French mathemati- 
cians, philosophers, or rhetoricians, in spite 
of their high qualities, leave me cold, be- 
cause there is in them no sense of the whole, 
the sum of things,1+— because they have 
no grasp of reality in its fulness, and there- 
fore either cramp and limit me or awaken 


188 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


my distrust. —The French lack that intui. 
tive faculty to which the living unity of 
things is revealed, they have very little 
sense of what is sacred, very little penetra- 
tion into the mysteries of being. What 
they excel in is the construction of special 
sciences ; the art of writing a book, style, 
courtesy, grace, literary models, perfection 
and urbanity ; the spirit of order, the art 
of teaching, discipline, elegance, truth of 
detail, power of arrangement; the desire 
and the gift for preselytism, the vigour 
necessary for practical conclusions. But if 
you wish to travel in the Inferno or the 
Paradiso you must take other guides. 
Their home is on the earth, in the region 
of the finite, the changing, the historical, and 
the diverse. Their logic never goes beyond 
the category of mechanism nor their meta- 
physic beyond dualism. When they under- 
take anything else they are doing violence 
to themselves. 


24th April (Noon).— All around me pro- 
found peace, the silence of the mountains 
in spite of a full house and a neighbouring 
village. No sound is to be heard but the 
murmur of the flies. There is something 
very striking in this calm. The middle of 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 189 


the day is like the middle of the night. 
Life seems suspended just when it is most 
intense. These are the moments in which 
one hears the infinite and perceives the in- 
effable. — Victor Hugo, in his Contempla- 
tions, has been carrying me from world to 
world, and since then his contradictions 
have reminded me of the convinced Chris- 
tian with whom I was talking yesterday in 
a house near by.... The same sunlight 
floods both the book and nature, the doubt- 
ing poet and the believing preacher, as well 
as the mobile dreamer, who, in the midst 
of all these various existences, allows him- 
self to be swayed by every passing breath, 
and delights, stretched along the car of his 
balloon, in floating aimlessly through all 
the sounds and shallows of the ether, and 
in realising within himself all the harmo- 
nies and dissonances of the soul, of feeling, 
and of thought. Idleness and contempla- 
tion! Slumber of the will, lapses of the 
vital force, indolence of the whole being, — 
how well I know you! ‘To love, to dream, 
to feel, to learn, to understand, — all these 
are possible to me if only I may be relieved 
from willing. It is my tendency, my in- 
stinct, my fault, my sin. I have a sort of 
primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of 


190 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


hatred, of all which dissipates the soul and 
makes it dependent upon external things 
and aims. The joy of becoming once more 
conscious of myself, of listening to the pas- 
sage of time and the flow of the universal 
life, is sometimes enough to make me for- 
get every desire, and to quench in me both 
the wish to produce and the power to exe- 
cute. Intellectual Epicureanism is always 
threatening to overpower me. I can only 
combat it by the idea of duty ; it is as the 
poet has said : — 


‘Ceux qui vivent, ce sont ceux qui luttent; ce 


sont 

Ceux dont un dessein ferme emplit l’ame et 
le front, 

Ceux qui d’un haut destin gravissent l’Apre 
cime, 

Ceux qui marchent pensifs, épris d’un but 
sublime, 

Ayant devant les yeux sans cesse, nuit et 
jour, 

Ou quelque saint labeur ou quelque grand 
amour !’* 


Five o’clock. —In the afternoon our little 
society met in general talk upon the ter- 
race. Some amount of familiarity and 


* Victor Hugo, Les Chitiments. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. IgI 


friendliness begins to show itself in our 
felations to each other. I read over again 
with emotion some passages of Jocelyn. 
How admirable it is! 


‘Il se fit de sa vie une plus male idée: 
Sa douleur d’un seul trait ne l’avait pas 
vidée; 
Mais, adorant de Dieu le sévére dessein, 
Tl sut la porter pleine et pure dans son sein, 
Et ne se hatant pas de la répandre toute, 
Sa résignation l’épancha goutte & goutte, 
Selon la circonstance et le besoin d’autrui, 
Pour tout vivifier sur terre autour de lui.’ * 


The true poetry is that which raises you, 
as this does, towards heaven, and fills you 
with divine emotion; which sings of love 
and death, of hope and sacrifice, and awak- 
ens the sense of the infinite. Jocelyn al- 
ways stirs in me impulses of tenderness 
which it would be hateful to me to see pro- 
faned by. satire. As a tragedy of feeling, it 
has no parallel in French, for purity, except 
Paul et Virginie, and I think that I prefer 
Jocelyn. To be just, one ought to read 
them side by side. 


Siz o’clock.—One more day is drawing 
to its close. With the exception of Mont 


* Epilogue of Jocelyn. 


192 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Blanc, all the mountains have already lost 
their colour. The evening chill succeeds 
the heat of the afternoon. The sense of 
the implacable flight of things, of the resist- 
less passage of the hours, seizes upon me 
afresh and oppresses me. 


‘ Nature au front serein, comme yous oubliez !’ 


In vain we cry with the poet, ‘O time, 
suspend thy flight!’. .. And what days, 
after all, would we keep and hold? Not 
only the happy days, but the lost days! 
The first have left at least a memory beliind 
them, the others nothing but a regret which 
is almost a remorse. ... 


Eleven o’clock.—A gust of wind. A few 
clouds in the sky. The nightingale is silent. 
On the other hand, the cricket and the river 
are still singing. 


9th August 1862.— Life, which seeks its 
‘own continuance, tends to repair itself with- 
out our help. It mends its spiders’ webs 
when they have been torn ; it re-establishes 
in us the conditions of health, and itself 
heals the injuries inflicted upon it; it binds 
the bandage again upon our eyes, brings 
back hope into our hearts, breathes health 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 193 


once more into our organs, and regilds the 
dream of our imagination. But for this, 
experience would have hopelessly withered 
and faded us long before the time, and the 
youth would be older than the centenarian. 
The wise part of us, then, is that which is 
unconscious of itself; and what is most 
reasonable in man are those elements in 
him which do not reason. Instinct, nature, 
a divine and impersonal activity, heal in us 
the wounds made by our own follies; the 
invisible genius of our life is never tired 
of providing material for the prodigalities of 
the self. The essential, maternal basis of 
our conscious life, is therefore that uncon- 
scious life which we perceive no more than 
the outer hemisphere of the moon perceives 
the earth, while all the time indissolubly 
and eternally bound to it. It is our dprli- 
xOwv, to speak with Pythagoras. 


_ Tth November 1862. — How malign, infec- 
tious, and unwholesome is the eternal smile 
of that indifferent criticism, that attitude of 
ironical contemplation, which corrodes and 
demolishes everything, that mocking piti- 
less temper, which holds itself aloof from 
every personal duty and every vulnerable 
affection, and cares only to understand 


194 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


without committing itself to action! Criti- 
cism become a habit, a fashion, and a sys- 
tem, means the destruction of moral energy, 
of faith, and of all spiritual force. One of 
my tendencies leads me in this direction, 
but I recoil before its results when I come 
across more emphatic types of it than my- 
self. And at least I cannot reproach myself 
with having ever attempted to destroy the 
moral force of others ; my reverence for life 
forbade it, and my self-distrust has taken 
from me even the temptation to it. 

This kind of temper is very dangerous 
among us, for it flatters all the worst in- 
stincts of men, —indiscipline, irreverence, 
selfish individualism, —and it ends in social 
atomism. Minds inclined to mere negation 
are only harmless in great political organ- 
isms, which go without them and in spite of 
them. The multiplication of them amongst 
ourselves will bring about the ruin of our 
little countries, for small states only live by 
faith and will. Woe to the society where 
negation rules, for life is an affirmation ; 
and a society, a country, a nation, is a 
living whole capable of death. No nation- 
ality is possible without prejudices, for 
public spirit and national tradition are but 
webs woven out of innumerable beliefs 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 195 
which have been acquired, admitted, and 
continued without formal proof and without 
discussion. To act, we must believe; to 
believe, we must make up our minds, affirm, 
decide, and in reality prejudge the question. 
He who will only act upon a full scientific 
certitude is unfit for practical life. But we 
are made for action, and we cannot escape 
from duty. Let us not, then, condemn 
prejudice so long as we have nothing but 
doubt to put in its place, or laugh at those 
whom we should be incapable of consoling ! 
This, at least, is my point of view. 

Beyond the element which is common to 
all men there is an element which separates 
them. This element may be religion, coun- 
try, language, education. But all these 
being supposed common, there still remains 
something which serves as a line of demar- 
cation— namely, the ideal. To have an 
ideal or to have none, to have this ideal or 
that, — this is what digs gulfs between men, 
even between those who live in the same 
family circle, under the same roof or in the 
same room. You must love with the same 
love, think with the same thought as some 
one else, if you are to escape solitude. 


196 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Mutual respect implies discretion and 
reserve even in love itself; it means pre- 
serving as much liberty as possible to those 
whose life we share. We must distrust our 
instinct of intervention, for the desire to 
make one’s own will prevail is often dis- 
guised under the mask of solicitude. 


How many times we become hypocrites 
simply by remaining the same outwardly 
and towards others, when we know that 
inwardly and to ourselves we are different. 
It is not hypocrisy in the strict sense, for 
we borrow no other personality than our 
own ; still, it is a kind of deception. The 
deception humiliates us, and the humilia- 
tion is a chastisement which the mask in- 
flicts upon the face, which our past inflicts 
upon our present. Such humiliation is 
good for us; for it produces shame, and 
shame gives birth to repentance. Thus in 
an upright soul good springs out of evil, 
and it falls only to rise again. 

8th January 1863.— This evening I read 
through the Cid and Rodogune. My im- 
pression is still a mixed and confused one. 
There is much disenchantment in my admi- 
ration, and a good deal of reserve in my 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 197 


enthusiasm. What displeases me in this 
dramatic art, is the mechanical abstraction 
of the characters, and the scolding, shrew- 
ish tone of the interlocutors. I had a vague 
impression of listening to gigantic marion- 
ettes, perorating through a trumpet, with 
the emphasis of Spaniards. There is power 
in it, but we have before us heroic idols 
rather than human beings. The element 
of artificiality, of strained pomposity and 
affectation, which is the plague of classical 
tragedy, is everywhere apparent, and one 
hears, as it were, the cords and pulleys of 
these majestic colossi creaking and groan- 
ing. I much prefer Racine and Shake- 
speare ; the one from the point of view of 
esthetic sensation, the other from that of 
psychological sensation. The southern 
theatre can never free itself from masks. 
Comic masks are bearable, but in the case 
of tragic heroes, the abstract type, the 
mask, make one impatient. I can laugh 
with personages of tin and pasteboard: I 
can only weep with the living, or what 
resembles them. Abstraction turns easily to 
caricature ; it is apt to engender mere shad- 
ows on the wall, mere ghosts and puppets. 
It is psychology of the first degree — ele- 
mentary psychology —just as the coloured 


198 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


pictures of Germany are elementary paint- 
ing.— And yet with all this, you have a 
double-distilled and often sophistical refine- 
ment: just as savages are by no means 
simple. The fine side of it all is the manly 
vigour, the bold frankness of ideas, words, 
and sentiments. Why is it that we find 
so large an element of factitious grandeur, 
mingled with true grandeur, in this drama 
of 1640, from which the whole dramatic 
development of monarchical France was to 
spring? Genius is there, but it is hemmed 
round by a conventional civilisation, and, 
strive as he may, no man wears a wig with 
impunity. 


13th January 1863. — To-day it has been 
the turn of Polyeucte and La Mort de Pom- 
pée. Whatever one’s objections may be, 
there is something grandiose in the style of 
Corneille which reconciles you at last even 
to his stiff, emphatic manner, and his over- 
ingenious rhetoric. But it is the dramatic 
genre which is false. His heroes are réles 
rather than men, They pose as magnanim- 
ity, virtue, glory, instead of realising them 
before us. They are always en scéne, 
studied by others, or by themselves. With 
them glory, — that is to say, the life of cere- 
mony and of affairs, and the opinion of the 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 199 


public, — replaces nature — becomes nature. 
They never speak except ore rotundo, in 
cothurnus, or sometimes on stilts. And 
what consummate advocates they all are* 
The French drama is an oratorical tourna- 
ment, a long suit between opposing parties, 
on a day which is to end with the death of 
somebody, and where all the personages 
represented are in haste to’speak before the 
hour of silence strikes. Elsewhere, speech 
serves to make action intelligible ; in French 
tragedy action is but a decent motive for 
speech. It is the procedure calculated to 
extract the finest possible speeches from the 
persons who are engaged in the action, and 
who represent different perceptions of it at 
different moments and from different points 
of view. Love and nature, duty and desire, 
and a dozen other moral antitheses, are the 
limbs moved by the wire of the dramatist, 
who makes them fall into all the tragic 
attitudes. What is really curious and 
amusing is that the people of all others the 
most vivacious, gay, and intelligent, should 
have always understood the grand style in 
this pompous, pedantic fashion. But it was 
inevitable. 


8th April 1863.—I have been turning 
over the 3500 pages of Les Misérables, try- 


200 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


ing to understand the guiding idea of this 
vast composition. — The fundamental idea 
of Les Misérables seems to be this. Society 
engenders certain frightful evils, — prostitu- 
tion, vagabondage, rogues, thieves, convicts, 
war, revolutionary clubs and_ barricades. 
She ought to impress this fact on her mind, 
and not treat all those who come in contact 
with her law as mere monsters. The task 
before us is to humanise law and opinion, 
to raise the fallen as well as the van- 
quished, to create a social redemption. 
How is this to be done? By enlightening 
vice and lawlessness, and so diminishing 
the sum of them, and by bringing to bear 
upon the guilty the healing influence of 
pardon. At bottom is it not a Christian- 
isation of society, this extension of charity 
from the sinner to the condemned criminal, 
this application to our present life of what 
the Church applies more readily to the 
other? Struggle to restore a human soul 
to order and to righteousness by patience 
and by love, instead of crushing it by your 
inflexible vindictiveness, your savage jus- 
tice! Such is the cry of the book. It is 
great and noble, but it is a little optimistic 
and Rousseau-like. According to it the indi- 
vidual is always innocent and society always 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 201 


responsible, and the ideal before us for the 
twentieth century is a sort of democratic 
age of gold, a universal republic from which 
war, capital punishment, and pauperism 
will have disappeared. It is the Religion 
and the City of Progress; in a word, the 
Utopia of the eighteenth century revived on 
a great scale. ‘There is a great deal of gen- 
erosity in it, mixed with not a little fanciful 
extravagance. The fancifulness consists 
chiefly in a superficial notion of evil. The 
author ignores or pretends to forget the 
instinct of perversity, the love of evil for 
evil’s sake, which is contained in the human 
heart. 

The great and salutary idea of the book, 
is that honesty before the law is a cruel 
hypocrisy, in so far as it arrogates to itself 
the right of dividing society according to 
its own standard into elect and reprobates, 
and thus confounds the relative with the 
absolute. The leading passage is that in 
which Javert, thrown off the rails, upsets 
the whole moral system of the strict Javert, 
half spy half priest, — of the irreproachable 
police-officer. In this chapter the writer 
shows us social charity illuminating and 
transforming a harsh and unrighteous jus- 
tice. Suppression of the social hell, that is 


202 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


to say, of all irreparable stains, of all social 
outlawries for which there is neither end 
nor hope:—it is an essentially religious 
idea. 

The erudition, the talent, the brilliancy 
of execution, shown in the book are aston- 
ishing, bewildering almost. Its faults are 
to be found in the enormous length allowed 
to digressions and episodical dissertations, 
in the exaggeration of all the combinations 
and all the theses, and, finally, in something 
strained, spasmodic, and violent in the style, 
which is very different from the style of 
natural eloquence or of essential truth. 
Effect is the misfortune of Victor Hugo, 
because he makes it the centre of his es- 
thetic system; and hence exaggeration, 
monotony of emphasis, theatricality of 
manner, a tendency to force and over-drive. 
A powerful artist, but one with whom you 
never forget the artist; and a dangerous 
model, for the master himself is already 
grazing the rock of burlesque, and passes 
from the sublime to the repulsive, from lack 
of power to produce one harmonious im- 
pression of beauty. It is natural enough 
that he should detest Racine. 

But what astonishing philological and 
literary power has Victor Hugo! He is 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 203 


master of all the dialects contained in our 
language, dialects of the courts of law, of 
the stock-exchange, of war, and of the sea, 
of philosophy and the convict-gang, the dia- 
lects of trade and of archeology, of the an- 
tiquarian and the scavenger. All the bric- 
a-brac of history and of manners, so to 
speak, —all the curiosities of soil, and sub- 
soil, —are known and familiar to him. He 
seems to have turned his Paris over and 
over, and to know it body and soul as one 
knows the contents of one’s pocket. What 
a prodigious memory and what a lurid im- 
agination! He is at once a visionary and 
yet master of his dreams ; he summons up 
and handles at will the hallucinations of 
opium or of haschish, without ever becom- 
ing their dupe; he makes of madness one 
of his tame animals, and bestrides, with 
equal coolness, Pegasus or Nightmare, the 
Hippogriff or the Chimera. As a physcho- 
logical phenomenon he is of the deepest 
interest. — Victor Hugo draws in sulphuric 
acid, he lights his pictures with electric 
light. He deafens, blinds, and bewilders 
his reader rather than he charms or per- 
suades him. Strength carried to such a 
point as this is a fascination ; without seem- 
ing to take you captive, it makes you its 


204° AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


prisoner ; it does not enchant you, but it 
holds you spellbound. His ideal is the ex- 
traordinary, the gigantic, the overwhelming, 
theincommensurable. His most character- 
istic words are immense, colossal, enormous, 
huge, monstrous. He findsa way of making 
even child-nature extravagant and bizarre. 
The only thing which seems impossible to 
him is to be natural. In short, his passion 
is grandeur, his fault is excess: his distin- 
guishing mark is a kind of Titanic power 
with strange dissonances of puerility in its 
magnificence. Where he is weakest is, in 
measure, taste, and sense of humour: he 
fails in esprit, in the subtlest sense of the 
word. — Victor Hugo is a gallicised Span- 
iard, or rather he unites all the extremes of 
south and north, the Scandinavian and the 
African. Gaul has less part in him than 
any other country. And yet, by a caprice 
of destiny, he is one of the literary geniuses 
of France in the nineteenth century ! — His 
resources are inexhaustible, and age seems 
to have no power over him. What an in- 
finite store of words, forms, and ideas he 
carries about with him, and what a pile of 
works he has left behind him to mark his 
passage! His eruptions are like those of a 
voleano; and, fabulous workman that he 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 205 


is,he goes on for ever raising, destroying, 
crushing, and rebuilding a world of his own 
creation, and a world rather Hindoo than 
Hellenic. 

He amazes me: and yet I prefer those 
men of genius who awaken in me the sense 
of truth, and who increase the sum of one’s 
inner liberty. In Hugo one feels the effort 
of the labouring Cyclops; give me rather 
the sonorous bow of Apollo, and the tran- 
quil brow of the Olympian Jove. His type 
is that of the Satyr in the Légende des 
Siécles, who crushes Olympus, a type mid- 
way between the ugliness of the Faun and 
the overpowering sublimity of the great 
Pan. 


23d May 1863.— Dull, cloudy, misty 
weather ; it rained in the night and yet the 
air is heavy. ‘This sombre reverie of earth 
and sky has a sacredness of its own, but it 
fills the spectator with a vague and stupefy- 
ing ennui. Light brings life: darkness 
may bring thought, but a dull daylight, the 
uncertain glimmer of a leaden sky, merely 
makes one restless and weary. These in- 
decisive and chaotic states of Nature are 
ugly, like all amorphous things, like smeared 
colours, or bats, or the viscous polyps of the 


206 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


sea. The source of all attractiveness is to 
be found in character, in sharpness of out- 
line, in individualisation. All that is con- 
fused and indistinct, without form, or sex, 
or accent, is antagonistic to beauty; for the 
mind’s first need is light; light means or- 
der, and order means, in the first place, the 
distinction of the parts, in the second, their 
regular action. Beauty is based on reason. 


7th August 1863.— A walk after supper, 
a sky sparkling with stars, the milky way 
magnificent. Alas! all the same my heart 
is heavy. 

At bottom I am always brought up 
against an incurable distrust of myself and 
of life, which towards my neighbour has 
become indulgence, but for myself has led 
to a régime of absolute abstention. All or 
nothing! Thisis my inborn disposition, my 
primitive stuff, my ‘old man.’ And yet if 
some one will but give me a little love, will 
but penetrate a little into my inner feeling, 
Iam happy and ask for scarcely anything 
else. A child’s caresses, a friend’s talk, 
are enough to make me gay and expansive. 
So then I aspire to the infinite, and yet a 
very little contents me ; everything disturbs 
me and the least thing calms me. I have 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 207 


often surprised in myself the wish for death, 
and yet my ambitions for happiness scarcely 
go beyond those of the bird: wings! sun! 
a nest! I persist in solitude because of a 
taste for it, so people think. No, it is from 
distaste, disgust, from shame at my own 
need of others, shame at confessing it, a 
fear of passing into bondage if I do con- 
fess it. 


2d September 1863. — How shall I find a 
name for that subtle feeling which seized 
hold upon me this morning in the twilight 
of waking? It was a reminiscence, charm- 
ing indeed, but nameless, vague, and 
featureless, like the figure of a woman seen 
for an instant by a sick man in the un- 
certainty of delirium, and across the shadows 
of his darkened room. I had a distinct sense 
of a form which I had seen somewhere, and 
which had moved and charmed me once, 
and then had fallen back with time into 
the catacombs of oblivion. But all the 
rest was confused: place, occasion, and the 
figure itself, for I saw neither the face nor 
its expression. The whole was like a flut- 
tering veil under which the enigma, — the 
secret, of happiness, — might have been 
hidden. And I was awake enough to be 
sure that it was not a dream. 


208 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


In impressions like these we recognise 
the last trace of things which are sinking 
out of sight and call within us, of memories 
which are perishing. It is like a shimmer- 
ing marsh-light falling upon some vague 
outline of which one scarcely knows whether 
it represents a pain or a pleasure, —a gleam 
upon a grave. How strange! One might 
almost call such things the ghosts of the 
soul, reflections of past happiness, the manes 
of our dead emotions. If, as the Talmud, 
I think, says, every feeling of love gives 
birth involuntarily to an invisible genius or 
spirit which yearns to complete its existence, 
and these glimmering phantoms, which have 
never taken to themselves form and reality, 
are still wandering in the limbo of the soul, 
what is there to astonish us in the strange 
apparitions which sometimes come to visit 
our pillow? At any rate, the fact remains 
that I was not able to force the phantom 
to tell me its name, nor to give any shape 
or distinctness to my reminiscence. 

What a melancholy aspect life may wear 
to us when we are floating down the current 
of such dreamy thoughts as these! It seems 
like some vast nocturnal shipwreck in which 
a hundred loving voices are clamouring for 
help, while the pitiless mounting wave is 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 209 


silencing all the cries one by one, before we 
have been able, in this darkness of death, 
to press a hand or give the farewell kiss. 
From such a point of view destiny looks 
harsh, savage, and cruel, and the tragedy 
of life rises like a rock in the midst of the 
dull waters of daily triviality. It is im- 
possible not to be serious under the weight 
of indefinable anxiety produced in us by 
such a spectacle. The surface of things 
may be smiling or commonplace, but the 
depths below are austere and terrible. As 
soon as we touch upon eternal things, upon 
the destiny of the soul, upon truth or duty, 
upon the secrets of life and death, we be- 
come grave whether we will or no. 

Love at its highest point, — love sublime, 
unique, invincible, —Jleads us straight to 
the brink of the great abyss, for it speaks 
to us directly of the infinite and of eternity. 
It is eminently religious: it may even be- 
come religion. — When all around a man is 
wavering and changing, — when everything 
is growing dark and featureless to him in 
the far distance of an unknown future, — 
when the world seems but a fiction or a 
fairy tale, and the universe a chimera, — 
when the whole edifice of ideas vanishes in 
smoke, and all realities are penetrated with 


210 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


doubt, — what is the fixed point which may 
still be his? The faithful heart of a 
woman! There he may rest his head; 
there he will find strength to live, strength 
to believe, and, if need be, strength to die 
in peace with a benediction on his lips. 
Who knows if love and its beatitude, clear 
manifestation as it is of the universal 
harmony of things, is not the best demon- 
stration of a fatherly and understanding 
God, just as it is the shortest road by which 
to reach Him? Love is a faith, and one 
faith leads to another. And this faith is 
happiness, light, and force. Only by it 
does a man enter into the series of the 
living, the awakened, the happy, the re- 
deemed, —of those true men who know 
the value of existence and who labour for 
the glory of God and of the Truth. Till 
then we are but babblers and chatterers, 
spendthrifts of our time, our faculties and 
our gifts, without aim, without real joy, — 
weak, infirm, and useless beings, of no 
account in the scheme of things. — Perhaps 
it is through love that I shall find my way 
back to faith, to religion, to energy, to con- 
centration. It seems to me, at least, that 
if I could but find my work-fellow and my 
destined companion, all the rest would be 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 211 


added unto me, as though to confound my 
unbelief and make me blush for my despair. 
Believe, then, in a fatherly Providence, 
and dare to love! 


25th November 1863.— Prayer is the 
essential weapon of all religions. He who 
can no longer pray because he doubts 
whether there is a being to whom prayer 
ascends and from whom blessing descends, 
he indeed is cruelly solitary and prodig- 
iously impoverished. And you, what do 
you believe about it? At this moment I 
should find it very difficult to say. All my 
positive beliefs are in the crucible ready for 
any kind of metamorphosis. Truth above 
all, even when it upsets and overwhelms us ! 
But what I believe is that the highest idea 
we can conceive of the principle of things 
will be the truest, and that the truest truth 
is that which makes man the most wholly 
good, wisest, greatest, and happiest. 

My creed is in transition. Yet I still be- 
lieve in God, and the immortality of the 
soul. I believe in holiness, truth, beauty ; 
I believe in the redemption of the soul by 
faith in forgiveness. . I believe in love, 
devotion, honour. I believe in duty and 
the moral conscience. I believe even in 


212 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


prayer. I believe in the fundamental in- 
tuitions of the human race, and in the 
great affirmations of the inspired of all 
ages. I believe that our higher nature is | 
our true nature. 

Can one get a theology and a theodicy 
out of this? Probably, but just now I do 
not see it distinctly. It is so long since I 
have ceased to think about my own meta- 
physic, and since I have lived in the thoughts 
of others, that Iam ready even to ask my- 
self whether the crystallisation of my be- 
liefs is necessary. Yes, for preaching and 
acting; less for studying, contemplating, 
and learning. 


4th December 1863.— The whole secret 
of remaining young in spite of years, and 
even of gray hairs, is to cherish enthusiasm 
in oneself, by poetry, by contemplation, by 
charity, — that is, in fewer words, by the 
maintenance of harmony in the soul. When 
everything is in its right place within us, 
we ourselves are in equilibrium with the 
whole work of God. Deep and grave en- 
thusiasm for the eternal beauty and the 
eternal order, reason touched with emotion 
and a serene tenderness of heart —these 
surely are the foundations of wisdom. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 213 


Wisdom! how inexhaustible a theme! 
A sort of peaceful aureole surrounds and il- 
lumines this thought, in which are summed 
up all the treasures of moral experience, 
and which is the ripest fruit of a well- 
spent life. Wisdom never grows old, for 
she is the expression of order itself, — that 
is, of the Eternal. Only the wise man 
draws from life, and from every stage of it, 
its true savour, because only he feels the 
beauty, the dignity, and the value of life. 
The flowers of youth may fade, but the 
summer, the autumn, and even the winter 
of human existence, have their majestic 
grandeur, which the wise man recognises 
and glorifies. To see all things in God; 
to make of one’s own life a journey towards 
the ideal ; to live with gratitude, with devout- 


ness, with gentleness and courage ;—this | 
was the splendid aim of Marcus Aurelius. | 


And if you add to it the humility which 
kneels, and the charity which gives, you 
haye the whole wisdom of the children of 
God, the immortal joy which is the heritage 
of the true Christian.— But what a false 
Christianity is that which slanders wisdom 
and seeks to do without it!—In such a 
case I am on the side of wisdom, which is, 
as it were, justice done to God, even in this 


214 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


life. The relegation of life to some distant 
future, and the separation of the holy man 
from the virtuous man, are the signs of a 
false religious conception. This error is, 
in some degree, that of the whole Middle 
Age, and belongs, perhaps, to the essence 
of Catholicism. But the true Christianity 
must purge itself from so disastrous a mis- 
take. The eternal life is not the future 
life ; it is life in harmony with the true 
order of things, —life in God. We must 
learn to look upon time as a movement of 
eternity, as an undulation in the ocean of 
being. To live, so as to keep this con- 
sciousness of ours in perpetual relation with 
the eternal, is to be wise; to live, so as to 
personify and embody the eternal, is to be 
religious. 


The modern leveller, after having done 
away with conventional inequalities, with 
arbitrary privilege and historical injustice, 
goes still farther, and rebels against the in- 
equalities of merit, capacity, and virtue. 
Beginning with a just principle, he develops 
it into an unjust one. Inequality may be 
as true and as just as equality: it depends 
upon what you mean by it. But this is pre- 
cisely what nobody cares to find out. All 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 215 


passions dread the light, and the modern 
zeal fur equality is a disguised hatred which 
tries to pass itself off as love. 


Liberty, equality — bad principles! The 
only true principle for humanity is justice, 
and justice towards the feeble becomes nec- 
essarily protection or kindness. 


2d April 1864.— To-day April has been 
displaying her showery caprices. We have 
had floods of sunshine followed by deluges 
of rain, alternate tears and smiles from the 
petulant sky, gusts of wind and storms. 
The weather is like a spoilt child whose 
wishes and expression change twenty times 
in an hour. It is a blessing for the plants, 
and means an influx of life through all the 
veins of the spring. The circle of moun- 
tains which bounds the valley is covered 
with white from top to toe, but two hours 
of sunshine would melt the snow away. 
The snow itself is but a new caprice, a 
simple stage decoration ready to disappear 
at the signal of the scene-shifter. 

‘How sensible I am to the restless vhange 
which rules the world. To appear, and to 
vanish, — there is the biography of all indi- 
viduals, whatever may be the length of the 


216 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


cycle of existence which they describe, and 
the drama of the universe is nothing more. 
All life is the shadow of a smoke-wreath, 
a gesture in the empty air, a hieroglyph 
traced for an instant in the sand, and ef- 
faced a moment afterwards by a breath of 
wind, an air-bubble expanding and vanish- 
ing on the surface of the great river of 
being —an appearance, a vanity, a nothing. 
But this nothing is, however, the symbol of 
the universal being, and this passing bubble 
is the epitome of the history of the world. 
The man who has, however impercepti- 
bly, helped in the work of the universe, has 
lived ; the man who has been conscious, in 
however small a degree, of the cosmical 
movement, has lived also. The plain man 
serves the world by his action and as a 
wheel in the machine; the thinker serves 
it by his intellect, and as a light upon its 
path. The man of meditative soul, who 
raises and comforts and sustains his travel- 
ling companions, mortal and fugitive like 
himself, plays a nobler part still, for he 
unites the other two utilities. Action, 
thought, speech, are the three modes of 
human life. The artisan, the savant, and 
the orator, are. all three God’s workmen. 
To do, to discover, to teach, — these three 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 249. 


things are all labour, all good, all necessary. 
Will-o’-the-wisps that we are, we may yet 
leave a trace behind us; meteors that we 
are, we may yet prolong our perishable 
being in the memory of men, or at least in 
the contexture of after events. Everything 
disappears, but nothing is lost, and the 
civilisation or city of man is but an im- 
mense spiritual pyramid, built up out of 
the work of all that has ever lived under 
the forms of moral being, just as our cal- 
careous mountains are made of the debris 
of myriads of nameless creatures who have 
lived under the forms of microscopic animal 
life. 


5th April 1864.—I have been reading 
Prince Vitale for the second time, and have 
been lost in admiration of it. What wealth 
of colour, facts, ideas, — what learning, 
what fine-edged satire, what esprit, science, 
and talent, and what an irreproachable 
finish of style, —so limpid, and yet so pro- 
found! It is not heartfelt and it is not 
spontaneous, but all other kinds of merit, 
culture, and cleverness the author possesses. 
It would be impossible to be more pene- 
trating, more subtle, and less fettered in 
mind, than this wizard of language, with 


218 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


his irony and his chameleon-like variety. 
— Victor Cherbuliez, like the sphinx, is 
able to play all lyres, and takes his profit 
from them all, with a Goethe-like serenity. 
It seems as if passion, grief, and error had 
no hold on this impassive soul. The key of 
his thought is to be looked for in Hegel’s 
Phenomenology of Mind, remoulded by 
Greek and French influences. His faith, 
if he has one, is that of Strauss, — Human- 
ism. But he is perfectly master of himself 
and of his utterances, and will take good 
care never to preach anything prematurely. 

What is there quite at the bottom of this 
deep spring? In any case a mind as free 
as any can possibly be from stupidity and 
prejudice. One might almost say that 
Cherbuliez knows all that he wishes to 
know, without the trouble of learning it. 
He is a calm Mephistopheles, with perfect 
manners, grace, variety, and an exquisite 
urbanity ; and Mephisto is aclever jeweller; 
and this jeweller is a subtle musician ; and 
this fine singer and story-teller, with his 
amber-like delicacy and brilliancy, is mak- 
ing mock of us all the while. He takes a 
malicious pleasure in withdrawing his own 
personality from scrutiny and divination, 
while he himself divines everything, and he 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 219 


likes to make us feel that although he holds 
in his hand the secret of the universe, he 
will only unfold his prize at his own time, 
and if it pleases him. Victor Cherbuliez is 
a little like Proudhon and plays with para- 
doxes, to shock the bourgeois. Thus he 
amuses himself with running down Luther 
and the Reformation in favour of the Re- 
naissance. Of the troubles of conscience he 
seems to know nothing. His supreme tri- 
bunal is reason. At bottom he is Hegelian 
and‘intellectualist. But it is a splendid or- 
ganisation. Only sometimes he must be 
antipathetic to those men of duty who 
make renunciation, sacrifice, and humility 
the measure of individual worth. 


July 1864, — Among the Alps I become a 
child again, with all the follies and naiveté 
of childhood. Shaking off the weight of 
years, the trappings of office, and all the 
tiresome and ridiculous caution with which 
one lives, I plunge into the full tide of 
pleasure, and amuse myself sans facon, — 
as it comes. In this careless light-hearted 
mood, my ordinary formulas and habits 
fall away from me so completely that I feel 
myself no longer either townsman, or pro- 
fessor, or savant, or bachelor, and I re- 


220 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


member no more of my past than if it were 
adream. It is like a bath in Lethe. 

It makes me really believe that the small- 
est illness would destroy my memory, and 
wipe out all my- previous existence, when I 
see with what ease I become a stranger to 
myself, and fall back once more into the 
condition of a blank sheet, a tabula rasa. 
Life wears such a dream-aspect to me that 
I can throw myself without any difficulty 
into the situation of the dying, before whose 
eyes all this tumult of images and forms 
fades into nothingness. I have the incon- 
sistency of a fluid, a vapour, a cloud, and 
all is easily unmade or transformed in me; 
everything passes and is effaced like the 
waves which follow each other on the sea. 
When I say all, I mean all that is arbitrary, 
indifferent, partial, or intellectual in the 
combinations of one’s life. For I feel that 
the things of the soul, our immortal aspira- 
tions, our deepest affections, are not drawn 
into this chaotic whirlwind of impressions. 
It is the finite things which are mortal and 
fugitive. Every man feels it on his death- 
bed. I feel it during the whole of life ; 
that is the only difference between me and 
others. Excepting only love, thought, and 
liberty, almost everything is now a matter 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. . 221 


of indifference to me, and those objects 
which excite the desires in most men, rouse 
in me little more than curiosity. What 
does it mean ? — detachment of soul, disin- 
terestedness, weakness, or wisdom ? 


19th September 1864. —I have been living 
for two hours with a noble soul — with 
Eugénie de Guérin, the pious heroine of 
fraternal love. How many thoughts, feel- 
ings, griefs, in this journal of six years! 
How it makes one dream, think and live! 
It produces a certain homesick impression 
on me, a little like that of certain forgotten 
melodies whereof the accent touches the 
heart, one knows not why. It is as though 
far-off paths came back to me, glimpses of 
youth, a confused murmur of voices, echoes 
from my past. Purity, melancholy, piety, 
a thousand memories of a past existence, 
forms fantastic and intangible like the fleet- 
ing shadows of a dream at waking, began 
to circle round the astonished reader. 


20th September 1864. — Read Eugénie de 
Guérin’s volume again right and left with 
a growing sense of attraction. Everything 
is heart, force, impulse, in these pages which 
have the power of sincerity and a brilliance 


222 » AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


of suffused poetry. A great and strong 
soul, a clear mind, distinction, elevation, 
the freedom of unconscious talent, reserve 
and depth, — nothing is wanting for this 
Sévigné of the fields, who has to hold her- 
self in with both hands lest she should write 
verse, so strong in her is the artistic im- 
pulse. 


16th October 1864. —I have just read a 
part of Eugénie de Guérin’s journal over 
again. It charmed me a little less than the 
first time. The nature seemed to me as 
beautiful, but the life of Eugénie was too 
empty, and the circle of ideas which occu- 
pied her, too narrow. 

It is touching and wonderful to see how 
little space is enough for thought to spread 
its wings in, but this perpetual motion 
within the four walls of a cell ends none 
the less by becoming wearisome to minds 
which are accustomed to embrace more ob- 
jects in their field of vision. Instead of a 
garden, the world ; instead of a library, the 
whole of literature ; instead of three orfour 
faces, a whole people and all history, —this 
is what the virile, the philosophic temper 
demands. Men must have more air, more 
room, more horizon, more positive knowl- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 223 


edge, and they end by suffocating in this 
little cage where Eugénie lives and moves, 
though the breath of heaven blows into it 
and the radiance of the stars shines down 
upon it. 


27th October 1864 (Promenade de la 
Treille). — ‘The air this morning was so 
perfectly clear and lucid that one might 
haye distinguished a figure on the Vou- 
ache.15 This level and brilliant sun had 
set fire to the whole range of autumn col- 
ours ; amber, saffron, gold, sulphur, yellow 
ochre, orange, red, copper-colour, aqua- 
marine, amaranth, shone resplendent on 
the leaves which were still hanging from 
the boughs or had already fallen beneath 
the trees. It was delicious. The martial 
step of our two battalions going out to their 
drilling-ground, the sparkle of the guns, the 
song of the bugles, the sharp distinctness 
of the house outlines, still moist with the 
morning dew, the transparent coolness of all 
the shadows — every detail in the scene was 
instinct with a keen and wholesome gaiety. 

There are two forms of autumn: there is 
the misty and dreamy autumn, there is the 
vivid and brilliant autumn : almost the dif- 
ference between the two sexes. The very 


224 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


word autumn is both masculine and fem- 
inine. Has not every season, in some 
fashion, its two sexes? Has it not its minor 
and its major key, its two sides of light and 
shadow, gentleness and force? Perhaps. 
All that is perfect is double ; each face has 
two profiles, each coin two sides. The 
scarlet autumn stands for vigorous activity : 
the gray autumn for meditative feeling. 
The one is expansive and overflowing; the 
other still and withdrawn. Yesterday our 
thoughts were with the dead. To-day we 
are celebrating the vintage. 


16th November 1864. — Heard of the death 
of ——. Will and intelligence lasted till 
there was an effusion on the brain which 
stopped everything. 

A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of 
water in the brain, and a man is out of 
gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought 
vanishes, the world disappears from him 
like a dream of morning. On what a spider 
thread is hung our individual existence! 
Fragility, appearance, nothingness. If it 
were not for our powers of self-detraction 
and forgetfulness, all the fairy world which 
surrounds and draws us would seem to us 
but a broken spectre in the darkness, an 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 225 


empty appearance, a fleeting hallucina- 
tion. Appeared —disappeared —there is 
the whole history of a man, or of a world, 
or of an infusoria. 

Time is the supreme illusion.’ It is but 
the inner prism by which we decompose 
being and life, the mode under which we 
perceive successively what is simultaneous 
in idea. The eye does not see a sphere all 
at once although the sphere exists all at 
once. Either the sphere must turn before 
the eye which is looking at it, or the eye 
must go round the sphere. In the first case 
it is the world which unrolls, or seems to 
unroll in time ; in the second case it is our 
thought which successively analyses and 
recomposes. For the supreme intelligence 
there is no time; what will be, is. Time 
and space are fragments of the Infinite for 
the use of finite creatures. God permits 
them, that He may not be alone. They 
are the mode under which creatures are 
possible and conceivable. Let us add that 
they are also the Jacob’s ladder of innumer- 
able steps by which the creation reascends 
to its Creator, participates in being, tastes 
of life, perceives the absolute, and can 
adore the fathomless mystery of the infi- 
nite divinity. That is the other side of the 


226 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


question. Our life is nothing, it is true, 
but our life is divine. A breath of nature an- 
nihilates us, but we surpass nature in pene- 
trating far beyond her vast phantasmagori« 
to the changeless and the eternal. To es- 
cape by the ecstasy of inward vision from 
the whirlwind of time, to see oneself sub 
specie eterni is the word of command of all 
the great religions of the higher races; and 
this psychological possibility is the founda- 
tion of all great hopes. The soul may be 
immortal because she is fitted to rise to- 
wards that which is neither born nor dies, 
towards that which exists substantially, 
necessarily, invariably, that is to say to- 
wards God. 


To know how to suggest is the great art 
of teaching. To attain it we must be able 
to guess what will interest; we must learn 
to read the childish soul as we might a piece 
of music. Then, by simply changing the 
key, we keep up the attraction and vary 
the song. 

The germs of all things are in every heart, 
and the greatest criminals as well as the 
greatest heroes are but different modes of 
ourselves. Only evil grows of itself, while 
for goodness we want effort and courage. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 227 


Melancholy is at the bottom of every- 
thing, just as at the end of all rivers is the 
sea. — Can it be otherwise in a world where 
nothing lasts, where all that we have loved 
or shall love must die? Is death, then, the 
secret of life? The gloom of an eternal 
mourning enwraps, more or less closely, 
every serious and thoughtful soul, as night 
enwraps the universe. 


A man takes to ‘piety’ from a thousand 
different reasons, — from imitation or from 
eccentricity, from bravado or from rever- 
ence, from shame of the past or from terror 
of the future, from weakness and from 
pride, for pleasure’s sake or for punish- 
ment’s sake, in order to be able to judge, 
or in order to escape being judged, and for 
a thousand other reasons ;— but he only 
becomes truly religious for religion’s sake. 


11th January 1865.—It is pleasant to 
feel nobly —that is to say, to live above 
the lowlands of vulgarity. Manufacturing 
Americanism and Cesarian democracy tend 
equally to the multiplying of crowds, gov- 
erned by appetite, applauding charlatanism, 
vowed to the worship of mammon and of 


228 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


pleasure, and adoring no other God than 
force. What poor samples of mankind 
they are who make up this growing major-. 
ity! Oh, let us remain faithful to the 
altars of the ideal! It is possible that the 
spiritualists may become the Stoics of a 
new epoch of Cesarian rule. Materialistic 
naturalism has the wind in its sails, and a 
general moral deterioration is preparing. 
No matter, so long as the salt does not lose 
its savour, and so long as the friends of the 
higher life maintain the fire of Vesta. The 
wood itself may choke the flame, but if the 
flame persists, the fire will only be the more 
splendid in the end. The great democratic 
deluge will not after all be able to effect 
what the invasion of the barbarians was 
powerless to bring about ; it will not drown 
altogether the results of the higher culture ; 
but we must resign ourselves to the fact 
that it tends in the beginning to deform and 
vulgarise everything. It is clear that es- 
thetic delicacy, elegance, distinction, and 
nobleness, —that atticism, urbanity, what- 
ever is suave and exquisite, fine and subtle, 
—all that makes the charm of the higher 
kinds of literature and of aristocratic culti- 
vation, — vanishes simultaneously with the 
society which corresponds to it.—If, as 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 229 


Pascal, I think, says, the more one devel- 
ops, the more difference one observes be- 
tween man and man, then we cannot say 
that the democratic instinct tends to men- 
tal development, since it tends to make a 
man believe that the pretensions have only 
to be the same to make the merits equal 
also. 


20th March 1865.—TI have just heard of 
fresh cases of insubordination among the 
students. Our youth become less and less 
docile, and seem to take for their motto, 
‘‘Our master is our enemy.’’ The boy 
insists upon having the privileges of the 
young man, and the young man tries to 
keep those of the gamin. At bottom all 
this is the natural consequence of our sys- 
tem of levelling democracy. As soon as 
difference of quality is, in politics, officially 
equal to zero, the authority of age, of 
knowledge, and of function disappears. 

The only counterpoise of pure equality 
is military discipline. In military uniform, 
in the police court, in prison, or on the 
execution ground, there is no reply possi- 
ble. But is it not curious that the régime 
of individual right should lead to nothing 
but respect for brute strength? Jacobinism 


230 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


brings with it Cesarism; the rule of the 
tongue leads ta the rule of the sword. 
Democracy and liberty are not one but 
. two.— A republic supposes a high state of 
morals, but no such state of morals is possi- 
ble without the habit of respect ; and there 
is no respect without humility. Now the 
pretension that every man has the necessary 
qualities of a citizen, simply because he was 
born twenty-one years ago, is as much as 
to say that labour, merit, virtue, character, 
and experience are to count for nothing; 
and we destroy humility when we proclaim 
that a man becomes the equal of all other 
men, by the mere mechanical and vegetative 
process of natural growth. Such a claim 
annihilates even the respect for age; for as 
the elector of twenty-one is worth as much 
as the elector of fifty, the boy of nineteen 
has no serious reason to believe himself in 
any way the inferior of his elder by one or 
two years. Thus the fiction on which the 
political order of democracy is based ends 
in something altogether opposed to that 
which democracy desires: its aim was to 
increase the whole sum of liberty ; but the 
result is to diminish it for all. 
The modern state is founded on the phi- 
losophy of atomism. Nationality, public 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 231 


spirit, tradition, national manners, disap- 
pear like so many hollow and worn-out 
entities; nothing remains to create move- 
ment but the action of molecular force and 
of dead weight. In such a theory liberty is 
identified with caprice, and the collective 
reason and age-long tradition of an old 
society are nothing more than soap-bubbles 
which the smallest urchin may shiver with 
a snap of the fingers. 

Does this mean that I am an opponent of 
democracy? Notatall. Fiction for fiction, 
it is the least harmful. But it is well not 
to confound its promises with realities. The 
fiction consists in the postulate of all demo- 
cratic government, that the great majority 
of the electors in a state are enlightened, 
free, honest, and patriotic, — whereas such 
a postulate is a mere chimera. The major- 
ity in any state is necessarily composed of 
the most ignorant, the poorest, and the least 
capable; the state is therefore at the mercy 
of accident and passion, and it always ends 
by succumbing at one time or another to 
the rash conditions which have been made 
for its existence. —A man who condemns 
himself to live upon the tight-rope must 
inevitably fall; one has no need to be a 
prophet to foresee such a result. 


232 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


“Apicrov uev vdwp, said Pindar; the best 
thing in the world is wisdom, and, in de- 
fault of wisdom, science. States, churches, 
society itself, may fall to pieces; science 
alone has nothing to fear, — until at least 
society once more falls a prey to barbarism. 
Unfortunately this triumph of barbarism is 
not impossible. The victory of the socialist 
Utopia, or the horrors of a religious war, 
reserve for us perhaps even this lamentable 
experience. 


8d April 1865.— What doctor possesses 
such curative resources as those latent in a 
spark of happiness or a single ray of hope ? 
The mainspring of life is in the heart. Joy 
is the vital air of the soul, and grief is a 
kind of asthma complicated by atony. Our 
dependence upon surrounding circumstances 
increases with our own physical weakness, 
and on the other hand, in health there is 
liberty. Health is the first of all liberties, 
and happiness gives us the energy which 
is the basis of health. To make any one 
happy, then, is strictly to augment his store 
of being, to double the intensity of his life, 
to reveal him to himself, to ennobdle him 
and transfigure him. Happiness does away 
with ugliness, and even makes the beauty 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 233 


of beauty. The man who doubts it, can 
never have watched the first gleams of ten- 
derness dawning in the clear eyes of one 
who loves ;— sunrise itself is a lesser mar- 
vel. In Paradise, then, everybody will be 
beautiful. For, as the righteous soul is 
naturally beautiful, as the spiritual body is 
but the visibility of the soul, its impalpable 
and angelic form, and as happiness beauti- 
fies all that it penetrates or even touches, 
ugliness will have no more place in the 
universe, and will disappear with grief, sin, 
and death. 

To the materialist philosopher the beauti- 
ful is a mere accident, and therefore rare. 
To the spiritualist philosopher the beautiful 
is the rule, the law, the universal founda- 
tion of things, to which every form returns 
as soon as the force of accident is with- 
drawn. Why are we ugly? Because we 
are not in the angelic state, because we are 
evil, morose, and unhappy. 

Heroism, ecstasy, prayer, love, enthu- 
siasm, weave a halo round the brow, for 
they are a setting free of the soul, which 
through them gains force to make its 
envelope transparent and shine through 
upon all around it. Beauty is, then, a 
phenomenon belonging to the spiritualisa- 


234 AMIEL’S JOURNAL, 


tion of matter. It is a momentary trans- 
figuration of the privileged object or being 
—a token fallen from heaven to earth in 
order to remind us of the ideal world. To 
study it, is to Platonise almost inevitably. 
As a powerful electric current can render 
metals luminous, and reveal their essence 
by the colour of their flame, so intense life 
and supreme joy can make the most simple 
mortal dazzlingly beautiful. Man, there- 
fore, is never more truly man than in these 
divine states. 

The ideal, after all, is truer than the. 
real: for the ideal is the eternal element 
in perishable things: it is their type, their 
sum, their raison d’étre, their formula in 
the book of the Creator, and therefore at 
once the most exact and the most con- 
densed expression of them. 


11th April 1865. —I have been measur- 
ing and making a trial of the new gray 
plaid which is to take the place of my old 
mountain shawl. The old servant which 
has been my companion for ten years, and 
which recalls to me so many poetical and 
delightful memories, pleases me better than 
its brilliant successor, even though this 
last has been a present from a friendly 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL, 235 


hand. But can anything take the place of 
the past, and have not even the inanimate 
witnesses of our life voice and language for 
us? Glion, Villars, Albisbrunnen, the 
Righi, the Chamossaire, and a hundred 
other places, have left something of them- 
selves behind them in the meshes of this 
woollen stuff which makes a part of my 
most intimate history.—The shawl, be- 
sides, is the only chivalrous article of dress 
which is still left to the modern traveller, 
the only thing about him which may be 
useful to others than himself, and by means 
of which he may still do his devoir to fair 
women! How many times mine has served 
them for a cushion, a cloak, a shelter, on 
the damp grass of the Alps, on seats of 
hard rock, or in the sudden cool of the pine- 
wood, during the walks, the rests, the read- 
ings, and the chats of mountain life! How 
many kindly smiles it has won for me! 
Even its blemishes are dear to me, for each 
darn and tear has its story, each scar is an 
armorial bearing. This tear was made by 
a hazel tree under Jaman—that by the 
buckle of a strap on the Frohnalp — that, 
again, by a bramble at Charnex ; and each 
time fairy needles have repaired the in- 


jury. 


236 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


‘Mon vieux manteau, que je vous remercie 
Car c’est & vous que je dois ces plaisirs !’ 


And has it not been to me a friend in 
suffering, a companion in good and evil 
fortune ? It reminds me of that centaur’s 
tunic which could not be torn off without 
carrying away the flesh and blood of its 
wearer. I am unwilling to give it up; 
whatever gratitude for the past, and what- 
ever piety towards my vanished youth is in 
me, seem to forbid it. The warp of this 
rag is woven out of Alpine joys, and its 
woof out of human affections. It also says 
to me in its own way — 


‘ Pauvre bouquet, fleurs aujourd’hui fanées ! 


And the appeal is one of those which move 
the heart, although profane ears neither 
hear it nor understand it. 

What a stab there is in those words, 
thou hast been! when the sense of them 
becomes absolutely clear to us. One feels 
oneself sinking gradually into one’s grave, 
and the past tense sounds the knell of our 
illusions as to ourselves. What is past is 
past: gray hairs will never become black 
curls again ; the forces, the gifts, the at- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 237 


tractions of youth, have vanished with our 
young days. 


‘Plus d’amour; partant plus de joie.’ 


How hard it is to grow old, when we 
have missed our life, when we have neither 
the erown of completed manhood nor of 
fatherhood! How sad it is to feel the 
mind declining before it has done its work, 
and the body growing weaker before it has 
seen itself renewed in those who might 
close our eyes and honour our name! — 
The tragic solemnity of existence strikes us 
with terrible force, on that morning when 
we wake to find the mournful word too late 
ringing in our ears! ‘Too late, the sand 
is turned, the hour is past! Thy harvest 
is unreaped—too late! Thou hast been 
dreaming, forgetting, sleeping —so much 
the worse! Every man rewards or pun- 
ishes himself. To whom or of whom 
wouldst thou complain ?’ — Alas ! 


21st April 1865 (Mornex). — A morning 
of intoxicating beauty, fresh as the feelings 
of sixteen, and crowned with flowers like 
a bride. The poetry of youth, of inno- 
sence, and of love, overflowed my soul. 
Even to the light mist hovering over the 


238 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


bosom of the plain —image of that tender 
modesty which veils the features and 
shrouds in mystery the inmost thoughts of 
the maiden —everything that I saw de- 
lighted my eyes and spoke to my imagina- 
tion. It was a sacred, a nuptial day! and 
the matin bells ringing in some distant vil- 
lage harmonised marvellously with the 
hymn of nature. ‘Pray,’ they said, ‘and 
love! Adore a fatherly and beneficent 
God.’ They recalled to me the accent of 
Haydn ; there was in them and in the land- 
scape a childlike joyousness, a naive grati- 
tude, a radiant heavenly joy innocent of 
pain and sin, like the sacred simple-hearted 
ravishment of Eve on the first day of her 
awakening in the new world. — How good 
a thing is feeling, —admiration! It is the 
bread of angels, the eternal food of cheru- 
bim and seraphim. 

I have not yet felt the air so pure, so life- 
giving, so ethereal, during the five days 
that I have been here. ‘To breathe is a 
beatitude. One understands the delights of 
a bird’s existence — that emancipation from 
all encumbering weight — that luminous and 
empyrean life, floating in blue space, and 
passing from one horizon to another with a 
stroke of the wing. One must have a great 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. . 239 


deal of air below one before one can be 
conscious of such inner freedom as this, 
such lightness of the whole being. Every 
element has its poetry, but the poetry of 
air is liberty. —Enough; to your work, 
dreamer ! 


80th May 1865.— All snakes fascinate 
their prey, and pure wickedness seems to 
inherit the power of fascination granted to 
the serpent. It stupefies and bewilders the 
simple heart, which sees it without under- 
standing it, which touches it without being 
able to believe in it, and which sinks en- 
gulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles 
in Etna. Non possum capere te, cape me, 
says the Aristotelian motto. Every dimin- 
utive of Beelzebub is an abyss, each demo- 
niacal act is a gulf of darkness. Natural 
cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even 
in animals, cast lurid gleams, as it were, 
into that fathomless pit of Satanic perver- 
sity which is a moral reality. 

Nevertheless behind this thought there 
rises another which tells me that sophistry 
is at the bottom of human wickedness, that 
the majority of monsters like to justify 
themselves in their own eyes, and that the 
first attribute of the Evil One is to be the 


240 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


father of lies. Before crime is committed 
conscience must be corrupted, and every 
bad man who succeeds in reaching a high 
point of wickedness begins with this. It 
is all very well to say that hatred is mur- 
der ; the man who hates is determined to see 
nothing in it but an act of moral hygiene. It 
is to do himself good that he does evil, just 
as a mad dog bites to get rid of his thirst. 
To injure others while at the same time 
knowingly injuring oneself is a step farther ; 
evil then becomes a frenzy, which, in its 
turn, sharpens into a cold ferocity. When- 
ever a man, under the influence of such a dia- 
bolical passion, surrenders himself to these 
instincts of the wild or venomous beast he 
must seem to the angels a madman —a luna- 
tic, who kindles his own Gehenna that he 
may consume the world in it, or as much of 
it as his devilish desires can Jay hold upon. 
Wickedness is for ever beginning a new 
spiral which penetrates deeper still into the 
abysses of abomination, for the circles of 
hell have this property —that they have 
noend. It seems as though divine perfec- 
tion were an infinite of the first degree, but 
as though diabolical perfection were an 
infinite of unknown power. — But no: for 
if so, evil would be the true God, and hell 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 241 


would swallow up creation. According to 
the Persian and the Christian faiths, good 
is to conquer evil, and perhaps even Satan 
himself will be restored to grace, — which 
is as much as to say that the divine order 
will be everywhere re-established. Love 
will be more potent than hatred ; God will 
save His glory, and His glory is in His 
goodness.— But it is very true that all 
gratuitous wickedness troubles. the ‘soul, 
because it seems to make the great lines of 
the moral order tremble within us by the 
sudden withdrawal of the curtain which 
hides from us the action of those dark 
corrosive forces which have ranged them- 
selves in battle against the divine plan. 


26th June 1865.—One may guess the 
why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it 
too subtle to give any account of. <A tear 
may be the poetical résumé of so many si- 
multaneous impressions, the quintessence of ~ 
so many opposing thoughts! It is like a : 
drop of one of those precious elixirs of the = 
- East which contain the life of twenty plants 
fused into a single aroma. Sometimes it is 
the mere overflow of the soul, the running 
over of the cup of reverie. All that one 
cannot or will not say, all that one refuses 


242 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


to confess even to oneself, — confused de- 
sires, secret trouble, suppressed grief, 
smothered conflict, voiceless regret, the 
emotions we have struggled against, the 
pain we have sought to hide, our supersti- 
tious fears, our vague sufferings, our restless 
presentiments, our unrealised dreams, the 
wounds inflicted upon our ideal, the dissatis- 
fied languor, the vain hopes, the multitude 
of small indiscernible ills which accumulate 
slowly in a corner of the heart like water 
dropping noiselessly from the roof of a 
cavern, —all these mysterious movements 
of the inner life end in an instant of emo- 
tion, and the emotion concentrates itself in 
a tear just visible on the edge of the eyelid. 

For the rest, tears express joy as well as 
sadness. They are the symbol of the 
powerlessness of the soul to restrain its 
emotion and to remain mistress of itself. 
Speech implies analysis ; when we are over- 
come by sensation or by feeling analysis 
ceases, and with it speech and liberty. Our 
only resource, after silence and stupor, is 
the language of action— pantomime. Any 
oppressive weight of thought carries us 
back to a stage anterior to humanity, to a 
gesture, a cry, a sob, and at last to swoon- 
ing and collapse ; that is te say. incapable 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 243: 


of bearing the excessive strain of sensation 
as men, we fall back successively to the 
stage of mere animate being, and then to 
that of the vegetable. Dante swoons at 
every turn in his journey through hell, and 
nothing paints better the violence of his 
emotions and the ardour of his piety. 

. .. And intense joy? It also with- 
draws into itself and is silent. To speak is 
to disperse and scatter. Words isolate and 
localise life in a single point ; they touch only 
the circumference of being; they analyse, 
they treat one thing at a time. Thus they 
decentralise emotion, and chill it in doing 
so. The heart would fain brood over its 
feeling, cherishing and protecting it. Its 
happiness is silent and meditative ; it listens 
to its own beafing and feeds religiously 
upon itself. 


8th August 1865 (Gryon sur Bex). — 
Splendid moonlight without a cloud. The 
night is solemn and majestic. The regi- 
ment of giants sleeps while the stars keep 
sentinel. In the vast shadow of the valley 
glimmer a few scattered roofs, while the 
torrent, organ-like, swells its eternal note 
in the depths of this mountain cathedral 
which has the heavens for roof. 


244 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


A last look at this blue night and bound- 
less landscape. Jupiter is just setting on 
the counterscarp of the Dent du Midi. 
From the starry vault descends an invisible 
snow-shower of dreams, calling us to a pure 
sleep. Nothing of voluptuous or enervat- 
ing in this nature. All is strong, austere 
and pure. Good night to all the world !— 
to the unfortunate and to the happy. Rest 
and refreshment, renewal and hope ; a day 
is dead — vive le lendemain! Midnight is 
striking. Another step made towards the 
tomb. 


13th August 1865.—I have just read 
through again the letter of J. J. Rousseau to 
Archbishop Beaumont with a little less 
admiration than I felt for i#~ was it ten or 
twelve years ago? This emphasis, this 
precision, which never tires of itself, tires 
the reader in the long run. The intensity of 
the style produces on one the impression of 
a treatise on mathematics. One feels the 
need of relaxation after it in something easy, 
natural, and gay. The language of Rous- 
seau demands an amount of labour which 
makes one long for recreation and relief. 

But how many writers and how many 
books descend from our Rousseau! On 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 245 


my way I noticed the points of departure 
of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Proudhon. 
Proudhon, for instance, modelled the plan 
of his great work, De la Justice dans 
VEglise et dansla Révolution, upon the letter 
of Rousseau to Beaumont ; his three volumes 
are a string of letters to an archbishop ; 
eloquence, daring, and elocution are all 
fused in a kind of perstjlage, which is the 
foundation of the whole. 

How many men we may find in one man, 
how many styles in a great writer! Rous- 
seau, for instance, has created a number of 
different genres. Imagination transforms 
him, and he is able to play the most varied 
parts with credit, among them even that of 
the pure logician. But as the imagination 
is his intellectual axis, —his master faculty, 
—he is, as it were, in all his works only 
half sincere, only half in earnest. We 
feel that his talent has laid him the wager 
of Carneades ; it will lose no cause, how- 
ever bad, as soon as the point of honour is 
engaged. It is indeed the temptation of all 
talent to subordinate things to itself and 
not itself to things; to coriquer for the 
sake of conquest, and to put self-love in 
the place of conscience. Talent is glad 
enough, no doubt, to triumph in a good 


246 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


cause; but it easily becomes a free lance, 
content, whatever the cause, so long as 
victory follows its banner. I do not know 
even whether success in a weak and bad 
cause is not the most flattering for talent, 
which then divides the honours of its tri- 
umph with nothing and no one. 

Paradox is the delight of clever people 
and the joy of talent. It is so pleasant to 
pit oneself against the world, and to over- 
bear mere commonplace good sense and 
vulgar platitudes! Talent and love of 
truth are then not identical; their tenden- 
cies and their paths are different. In order 
to make talent obey when its instinct is 
rather to command, a vigilant moral sense 
and great energy of character are needed. 
The Greeks —those artists of the spoken 
or written word — were artificial by the 
time of Ulysses, sophists by the time of 
Pericles, cunning, rhetorical, and versed in 
all the arts of the courtier down to the end 
of the lower empire. From the talent of 
the nation sprang its vices. 

For a man to make his mark, like Rous- 
seau, by polemics, is to condemn himself to 
perpetual exaggeration and conflict. Such 
a man expiates his celebrity by a double 
bitterness ; he is never altogether true, and 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 247 


he is never able to recover the free disposal 
of himself. To pick a quarrel with the 
world is attractive, but dangerous, 

J.J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. 
It was he who founded travelling on foot 
before Topffer, reverie before René, literary 
botany before George Sand, the worship of 
nature before Bernardin de S. Pierre, the 
democratic theory before the Revolution of 
1789, political discussion and theological 
discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the 
science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and 
Alpine description before De Saussure. 
He made music the fashion, and created 
the taste for confessions to the public. He 
formed a new French style, —the close, 
chastened, passionate, interwoven style we 
know so well. Nothing indeed of Rousseau 
has been lost, and nobody has had more 
influence than he upon the French Revolu- 
tion, for he was the demigod of it, and 
stands between Necker and Napoleon. No- 
body, again, has had more than he upon 
the nineteenth century, for Byron, Chateau- 
briand, Madame de Staél, and George Sand 
all descend from him. 

And yet, with these extraordinary tal- 
ents, he was an extremely unhappy man — 
why ? Because he always allowed himself 


248 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


to be mastered by his imagination and his 
sensations ; because he had no judgment in 
deciding, no self-control in acting. Regret 
indeed on this score would be hardly reason- 
able, for a calm, judicious, orderly Rousseau 
would never have made so great an impres- 
sion. He came into collision with his time: 
hence his eloquence and his misfortunes. 
His naive confidence in life and himself 
ended in jealous misanthropy and hypo- 
chondria. 

What a contrast to Goethe or Voltaire, 
and how differently they understood the 
practical wisdom of life and the manage- 
ment of literary gifts! They were the able 
men, — Rousseau is a visionary. They 
knew mankind as it is, —he always repre- 
sented it to himself either whiter or blacker 
than it is; and having begun by taking life 
the wrong way, he ended in madness. In 
the talent of Rousseau there is always 
something unwholesome, uncertain, stormy, 
and sophistical, which destroys the confi- 
dence of the reader; and the reason is no 
doubt that we feel passion to have been the 
governing force in him as a writer: passion 
stirred his imagination, and ruled supreme 
over his reason. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 249 


Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more 
than an unconscious apology for our faults 
—a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to 
hide from us our favourite sin. 


The mutinished is nothing. 


engi men are , the was men, the men in 
whom Nature has succeeded. They are not 
extraordinary — they are in the true order. — 
It is the other species of men who are not 
what they ought to be. 


7th January 1866.—Our life is but a 
soap-bubble hanging from a reed; it is 
formed, expands to its full size, clothes it- 
self with the loveliest colours of the prism, 
and even escapes at moments from the law 
of gravitation; but soon the black speck 
appears in it, and the globe of emerald and 
gold vanishes into space, leaving behind it 
nothing but a simple drop of turbid water. 
All the poets have made this comparison, 
it is so striking and so true. To appear, to 
shine, to disappear; to be born, to suffer, 
and to die; is it not the whole sum of life, 
for a butterfly, for a nation, for a star? 

Time is but the measure of the difficulty 
of aconception. Pure thought has scarcely 


250 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


any need of time, since it perceives the two 
ends of an idea almost at the same moment. 
The thought of a planet can only be worked 
out by Nature with labour and effort, but 
supreme intelligence sums up the whole in 
an instant. Time is then the successive 
dispersion of being, just as speech is the 
successive analysis of an intuition or of an 
act of will. In itself it is relative and neg- 
ative, and disappears within the absolute 
being. God is outside time because He 
thinks all thought at once ; Nature is within 
time because she is only speech —the dis- 
cursive unfolding of each thought contained 
within the infinite thought. But Nature 
exhausts herself in this impossible task, for 
the analysis of the infinite is a contradic- 
tion. With limitless duration, boundless 
space, and number without end, Nature 
does at least what she can to translate into 
visible form the wealth of the creative 
formula. By the vastness of the abysses 
into which she penetrates, in the effort — 
the unsuccessful effort —to house and con- 
tain the eternal thought, we may measure 
the greatness of the divine mind. For as 
soon as this mind goes out of itself and seeks 
to explain itself, the effort at utterance 
heaps universe upon universe, during myr- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 251 


fads of centuries, and still it is not ex- 
pressed, and the great harangue must go 
on for ever and ever. 

The East prefers immobility as the form 
of the Infinite: the West, movement. It 
is because the West is infected by the pas- 
sion for details, and sets proud store by in- 
dividual worth. Like a child upon whom 
a hundred thousand francs have been be- 
stowed, she thinks she is multiplying her 
fortune by counting it out in pieces of 
twenty sous, or five centimes. Her passion 
for progress is in great part the product of 
an infatuation, which consists in forgetting 
the goal to be aimed at, and absorbing her- 
self in the pride and delight of each tiny 
step, one after the other. Child that she 
is, she is even capable of confounding 
change with improvement — beginning over 
again, with growth in perfectness. 

At the bottom of the modern man there 
is always a great thirst for self-forgetful- 
- ness, self-distraction ; he has a secret horror 
of all which makes him feel his own little- 
ness; the eternal, the infinite, perfection, 
therefore scare and terrify him. He wishes 
to approve himself, to admire and congratu- 
late himself ; and therefore he turns away 
from all those problems and abysses which 


252 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


might recall to him his own nothingness. 
This is what makes the real pettiness of so 
many of our great minds, and accounts for 
the lack of personal dignity among us — 
civilised parrots that we are — as compared 
with the Arab of the desert ; or explains 
the growing frivolity of our masses, more 
and more educated, no doubt, but also more 
and more superficial in all their conceptions 
of happiness. 

Here, then, is the service which Chris- 
tianity — the Oriental element in our cul- 
ture—renders to us Westerns. It checks 
and counterbalances our natural tendency 
towards the passing, the finite, and the 
changeable, by fixing the mind upon the 
contemplation of eternal things, and by 
Platonising our affections, which otherwise 
would have too little outlook upon the ideal 
world. Christianity leads us back from 
dispersion to concentration, from worldli- 
ness to self-recollection. It restores to our 
souls, fevered with a thousand sordid desires, 
nobleness, gravity, and calm. Just as sleep 
is a bath of refreshing for our actual life, so 
religion is a bath of refreshing for our im- 
mortal being. What is sacred has a purify- 
ing virtue; religious emotion crowns the 
brow with an aureole, and thrills the heart 
with an ineffable joy. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 253 


I think that the adversaries of religion as 
such deceive themselves as to the needs of 
the Western man, and that the modern 
world will lose its balance as soon as it has 
passed over altogether to the crude doctrine 
of progress. We have always need of the 
infinite, the eternal, the absolute ; and since 
science contents itself with what is relative, 
it necessarily leaves a void, which it is good 
for man to fill with contemplation, worship, 
and adoration. ‘ Religion,’ said Bacon, ‘is 
the spice which is meant to keep life from 
corruption,’ and this is especially true to- 
day of religion taken in the Platonist and 
Oriental sense. A capacity for self-recol- 
lection — for withdrawal from the outward 
to the inward —is in fact the condition of 
all noble and useful activity. 

This return, indeed, to what is serious, 
flivine, and sacred, is becoming more and 
more difficult, because of the growth of 
eritical anxiety within the Church itself, 
the increasing worldliness of religious 
preaching, and the universal agitation and 
disquiet of society. But such a return is 
more and more necessary. Without it there 
is no inner life, and the inner life is the 
only means whereby we may oppose a 
profitable resistance to circumstance. If 


254 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


the sailor did not carry with him his own 
temperature he could not go from the pole 
to the equator, and remain himself in spite 
of all. The man who has no refuge in him- 
self, who lives, so to speak, in his front 
rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and 
opinions, is not properly a personality at 
all; he is not distinct, free, original, a 
cause, —in a word, some one. He is one 
of a crowd, a taxpayer, an elector, an ano- 
nymity, but not aman. He helps to make 
up the mass—to fill up the number of 
human consumers or producers; but he 
interests nobody but the economist and the 
statistician, who take the heap of sand as a 
whole into consideration, without troubling 
themselves about the uninteresting uni- 
formity of the individual grains. The crowd 
counts only as a massive elementary force 
—why ? because its constituent parts are 
individually insignificant: they are all like 
each other, and we add them up like the 
molecules of water in a river, gauging them 
by the fathom instead of appreciating them 
as individuals. Such men are reckoned and 
weighed merely as so many bodies: they 
have never been individualised by con- 
science, after the manner of souls. 

He who floats with the current, who does 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 255 


not guide himself according to higher prin- 
ciples, who has no ideal, no convictions, — 
such a man is a mere article of the world’s 
furniture—a thing moved, instead of a 
living and moving being—an echo, not 
a voice. The man who has no inner life is 
the slave of his surroundings, as the ba- 
rometer is the obedient servant of the air at 
rest, and the weathercock the humble ser- 
yant of the air in motion. 


21st January 1866.— This evening after 
supper I did not know whither to betake 
my solitary self. I was hungry for conver- 
sation, society, exchange of ideas. It oc- 
curred to me to go and see our friends the 
——s: they were at supper. Afterwards 
we went into the salon: mother and daugh- 
ter sat’down to the piano and sang a duet 
by Boieldieu. The ivory keys of the old 
grand piano, which the mother had played 
on before her marriage, and which has fol- 
lowed and translated into music the varying 
fortunes of the family, were a little loose 
and jingling; but the poetry of the past 
sang in this faithful old servant, which had 
been a friend in trouble, a companion in 
vigils, and the echo of a lifetime of duty, 
affection, piety, and virtue. I was more 


256 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


moved than I can say. It was like a scene 
of Dickens, and I felt a rush of sympathy, 
untouched either by egotism or by melan- 
choly. 

Twenty-five years! It seems to me a 
dream as far as I am concerned, and I can 
scarcely believe my eyes, or this inanimate 
witness to so many lustres passed away. 
How strange a thing to have lived, and to 
feel myself so far from a past which yet is 
so present to me! One does not know 
whether one is sleeping or waking. Time 
is but the space between our memories ; as 
soon as we cease to perceive this space, time 
has disappeared. The whole life of an old 
man may appear to him no longer than an 
hour, or less still; and as soon as time-is 
but a moment to us, we have entered upon 
eternity. Life is but the dream of a 
shadow: I felt it anew this evening with 
strange intensity. 


29th January 1866 (Nine o'clock in the 
morning). —The gray curtain of mist has 
spread itself again over the town: every- 
thing is dark and dull. The bells are ring- 
ing in the distance for some festival ; with 
this exception everything is calm and silent. 
Except for the crackling of the fire, no noise 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 257 


disturbs my solitude in this modest home, 
the shelter of my thoughts and of my work, 
where the man of middle age carries on the 
life of his student-youth without the zest of 
youth, and the sedentary professor repeats 
day by day the habits which he formed as 
a traveller. 

What is it which makes the charm of this 
existence outwardly so barren and empty ? 
Liberty ! What does the absence of comfort 
and of all else that is wanting to these 
rooms matter to me? ‘These things are 
indifferent to me. I find under this roof 
light, quiet, shelter. I am near to a sister 
and her children, whom I love : my material 
life is assured—that ought to be enough 
for a bachelor... . Am I not, besides, a 
creature of habit ?— more attached to the 
ennuis I know, than in love with pleasures 
unknown to me. I am, then, free and not 
unhappy.— Then I am well off here, and I 
should be ungrateful to complain. Nor do 
I. It is only the heart which sighs and 
seeks for something more and better. The 
heart is an insatiable glutton, as we all 
know, — and for the rest, who is without 
yearnings ? It is our destiny here below. 
Only some go through torments and troubles 
in order to satisfy themselves, and all with- 


258 © AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


out success: others foresee the inevitable 
result, and by a timely resignation save 
themselves a barren and fruitless effort. 
Since we cannot be happy, why give our- 
selves so much trouble? It is best to limit 
oneself to what is strictly necessary, to live 
austerely and by rule, to content oneself 
with a little, and to attach no value to 
anything but peace of conscience and a 
sense of duty done. 

It is true that this itself is no small 
ambition, and that it only lands us in 
another impossibility. No, — the simplest 
course is to submit oneself wholly and 
altogether to God. Everything else, as 
saith the Preacher, is but vanity and vexa- 
tion of spirit. 

It is a long while now since this has been 
plain to me, and since this religious re- 
nunciation has been sweet and familiar to 
me. It is the outward distractions of life, 
the examples of the world, and the irresisti- 
ble influence exerted upon us by the current. 
of things which make us forget the wisdom 
we have acquired and the principles we 
have adopted. That is why life is such 
weariness! This eternal beginning over 
again is tedious, even to repulsion. It 
would be so good to go to sleep when we 


AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 259 


have gathered the fruit of experience, when 
we are no longer in opposition to the 
supreme will, when we have broken loose 
from self, when we are at peace with ali 
men. Instead of this, the old round of 
temptations, disputes, ennuis, and forget- 
tings, has to be faced again and again, and 
we fall back into prose, into commonness, 
into vulgarity. How melancholy, how hu- 
mmiliating! The poets are wise in with- 
drawing their heroes more quickly from 
the strife, and in not dragging them after 
victory along the common rut of barren 
days. ‘Whom the gods love die young,’ 
said the proverb of antiquity. 

Yes, but it is our secret self-love which is 
set upon this favour from on high; such 
may be our desire, but such is not the will 
of God. We are to be exercised, humbled, 
tried, and tormented to the end. It is our 
patience which is the touchstone of our 
virtue. To bear with life even when illusion 
and hope are gone; to accept this position 
of perpetual war, while at the same time 
loving only peace ; to stay patiently in the 
world, even when it repels us as a place of 
low company, and seems to us a mere arena 
of bad passions ; to remain faithful to one’s 
own faith without breaking with the fol- 


260 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


lowers of the false gods; to make no 
attempt to escape from the human hospital, 
long-suffering and patient as Job upon his 
dunghill ;—this is duty. When life ceases 
to be a promise it does not cease to be a 
task ; its true name even is Trial. 


2d April 1866 (Mornex).—The snow is 
melting and a damp fog is spread over 
everything. The asphalte gallery which 
runs along the salon is a sheet of quivering 
water starred incessantly by the hurrying 
drops falling from the sky. It seems as if 
one could touch the horizon with one’s 
hand, and the miles of country which were 
yesterday visible are all hidden under a 
thick gray curtain. 

This imprisonment transports me to 
Shetland, to Spitzbergen, to Norway, to 
the Ossianic countries of mist, where man, 
thrown back upon himself, feels his heart 
beat more quickly and his thought expand 
more freely —so long, at least, as he is not 
frozen and congealed by cold. Fog has 
certainly a poetry of its own—a grace, a 
dreamy charm. It does for the daylight 
what a lamp does for us at night; it turns 
the mind towards meditation ; it throws the 
soul back on itself. The sun, as it were, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 261 


sheds us abroad in Nature, scatters and dis- 
perses us; mist draws us together and con- 
centrates us —it is cordial, homely, charged 
with feeling. The poetry of the sun has 
something of the epic in it; that of fog and 
mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is 
the child of light; mist engenders faith in 
near protectors. When the great world is 
shut off from us, the house becomes itself 
a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual 
mist, men love each other better; for the 
only reality then is the family, and, within 
the family, the heart; and the greatest 
thoughts come from the heart,—so says 
the moralist. 


6th April 1866.— The novel by Miss 
Mulock, John Halifax, Gentleman, is a 
bolder book than it seems, for it attacks 
in the English way the social problem of 
equality. And the solution reached is that 
every one may become a gentleman, even 
though he may be born in the gutter. In 
its way the story protests against conven- 
tional superiorities, and shows that true 
nobility consists in character, in personal 
merit, in moral distinction, in elevation of 
feeling and of language, in dignity of life, 
and in self-respect. This is better than 


262 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Jacobinism, and the opposite of the mere 
brutal passion for equality. Instead of 
dragging everybody down, the author sim- 
ply proclaims the right of every one to rise. 
A man may be born rich and noble — he is 
not born a gentleman. This word is the 
Shibboleth of England: it divides her into 
two halves, and civilised society into two 
‘castes. Among gentlemen — courtesy, 
equality, and politeness; towards those 
below — contempt, disdain, coldness, and 
indifference. It is the old separation be- 
tween the ingenui and all others; between 
the édedGepo. and the Bdvavoo, the continu- 
ation of the feudal division between the 
gentry and the roturiers. 

What, then, is a gentleman? Apparently 
he is the free man, the man who is stronger 
than things, and believes in personality as 
superior to all the accessory attributes of 
fortune, such as rank and power, and as 
constituting what is essential, real, and in- 
trinsically valuable in the individual. Tell 
me what you are, and I will tell you what 
you are worth. ‘God and my Right’; 
there is the only motto he believes in. 
Such an ideal is happily opposed to that 
vulgar ideal which is equally English, the 
ideal of wealth, with its formula, ‘ How 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 263 


much is he worth?’ In a country where 
poverty is a crime, it is good to be able to 
say that a nabob need not as such be a 
gentleman. ‘The mercantile ideal and the 
chivalrous ideal counterbalance each other ; 
and if the one produces the ugliness of 
English society and its brutal side, the 
other serves as a compensation. 

The gentleman, then, is the man who is 
master of himself, who respects himself, and 
makes others respect him. The essence of 
gentlemanliness is self-rule, the sovereignty 
of the soul. It means a character which 
possesses itself, a force which governs itself, 
a liberty which affirms and regulates itself, 
according to the type of true dignity. Such 
an ideal is closely akin to the Roman type 

-of dignitas cum auctoritate. It is more 
moral than intellectual, and is particularly 
suited to England, which is pre-eminently 
the country of will. — But from self-respect 
a thousand other things are derived — such 
as the care of a man’s person, of his lan- 
guage, of his manners; watchfulness over 
his body and over his soul; dominion over 
his instincts and his passions; the effort to 
be self-sufficient ; the pride which will accept 
no favour; carefulness not to expose him- 
self to any humiliation or mortification, 


264 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


and to maintain himself independent of any 
human caprice ; the constant protection of 
his honour and of his self-respect. Such a 
condition of sovereignty, insomuch as it is 
only easy to the man who is well born, well 
bred, and rich, was naturally long identi- 
fied with birth, rank, and above all with 
property. — The idea ‘gentleman’ is, then, 
derived from feudality ; it is, as it were, a 
milder version of the seigneur. 

In order to lay himself open to no 
reproach, a gentleman will keep himself 
irreproachable ; in order to be treated with 
consideration, he will always be careful 
himself to observe distances, to apportion 
respect, and to observe all the gradations of 
conventional politeness, according to rank, 
age, and situation. Hence it follows that 
he will be imperturbably cautious in the 
presence of a stranger, whose name and 
worth are unknown to him, and to whom 
he might perhaps show too much or too 
little courtesy. He ignores and avoids him; 
if he is approached, he turns away ; if he 
is addressed, he answers shortly and with 
hauteur. His politeness is not human and 
general, but individual and relative to 
persons. This is why every Englishman 
contains two different men,—one turned 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 265 


towards the world, and another. The first, 
the outer man, is a citadel, a cold and an- 
gular wall; the other, the inner man, is a 
sensible, affectionate, cordial, and loving 
creature. Such a type is only formed in a 
moral climate full of icicles, where, in the 
face of an indifferent world, the hearth 
alone is hospitable. 

So that an analysis of the national type 
of gentleman reveals to us the nature and 
the history of the nation, as the fruit reveals 
the tree. 


7th April 1866. — If philosophy is the art 
of understanding, it is evident that it must 
begin by saturating itself with facts and 
realities, and that premature abstraction 
kills it, just as the abuse of fasting destroys 
the body at the age of growth. Besides, 
we only understand that which is already 
within us. To understand is to possess the 
thing understood, first by sympathy and 
then by intelligence. Instead, then, of first 
dismembering and dissecting the object to 
be conceived, we should begin by laying 
hold of it in its ensemble, then in its forma- 
tion, last of all in its parts. The procedure 
is the same, whether we study a watch or a 
plant, a work of art or a character. We 


266 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


must study, respect, and question what we 
want to know, instead of massacring it. 
We must assimilate ourselves to things and 
surrender ourselves to them ; we must open 
our minds with docility to their influence, 
and steep ourselves in their spirit and their 
distinctive form, before we offer violence to 
them by dissecting them. 


14th April 1866. — Panic, confusion, sauve 
qui peut on the Bourse at Paris. In our 
epoch of individualism, and of ‘each man 
for himself and God for all,’ the movements 
of the public funds are all that now repre- 
sent to us the beat of the common heart. 
The solidarity of interests which they imply 
counterbalances the separateness of modern 
affections, and the obligatory sympathy 
they impose upon us recalls to one a little 
the patriotism which bore the forced taxes 
of old days. We feel ourselves bound up 
with and compromised in all the world’s 
affairs, and we must interest ourselves 
whether we will or no in the terrible ma- 
chine whose wheels may crush us at any 
moment. Credit produces a restless society, 
trembling perpetually for the security of its 
artificial basis. Sometimes Society may 
forget for a while that it is dancing upon 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 267 


a volcano, but the least rumour of war re- 
calls the fact to it inexorably. Card-houses 
are easily ruined. 

All this anxiety is intolerable to those 
humble little investors who, having no wish 
to be rich, ask only to be able to go about 
their work in peace. But no; tyrant that 
it is, the world cries to us, ‘ Peace, peace, 
—there is no peace: whether you will or 
no you shall suffer and tremble with me!’ 
To accept humanity, as one does Nature, 
and to resign oneself to the will of an indi- 
vidual, as one does to destiny, is not easy. 
We bow to the government of God, but we 
turn against the despot. No man likes to 

share in the shipwreck of a vessel in which 
he has been embarked by violence, and 
which has been steered contrary to his wish 
and his opinion. And yet such is perpet- 
ually the case in life. We all of us pay for 
the faults of the few. 

Human solidarity is a fact more evident 
and more certain than personal responsi- 
bility, and even than individual liberty. 
Our dependence has it over our indepen- 
dence; for we are only independent in will 
and desire, while we are dependent upon 
our health, upon Nature and society; in 
short, upon everything in us and without 


268 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


us. Our liberty is confined to one single 
point. We may protest against all these 
oppressive and fatal powers; we may say, 
Crush me,—you will never win my con- 
sent! We may, by an exercise of will, 
throw ourselves into opposition to necessity, 
and refuse. it homage and obedience. In 
that consists our moral liberty. But except 
for that, we belong, body and goods, to the 
world. We are its playthings, as the dust 
is the plaything of the wind, or the dead 
leaf of the floods. God at least respects our 
dignity, but the world rolls us contemptu- 
ously along in its merciless waves, in order 
to make it plain that we are its thing and 
its chattel. 

All theories of the nullity of the individ- 
ual, all pantheistic and materialist concep- 
tions, are now but so much forcing of an 
open door, so much slaying of the slain. 
As soon as we cease to glorify this imper- 
ceptible point of conscience, and to uphold 
the value of it, the individual becomes 
naturally a mere atom in the human mass, 
which is but an atom in the planetary 
mass, which is a mere nothing in the uni- 
verse. The individual is then but a nothing 
of the third power, with a capacity for 
measuring its nothingness! Thought leads 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 269 


to resignation. Self-doubt leads to passiv- 
ity, and passivity to servitude. — From this 
a voluntary submission is the only escape, 
that is to say, a state of dependence relig- 
iously accepted, a vindication of ourselves 
as free beings, bowed before duty only. 
Duty thus becomes our principle of action, 
our source of energy, the guarantee of our 
partial independence of the world, the con- 
dition of our dignity, the sign of our nobil- 
ity. The world can neither make me will 
nor make me will my duty; here I am my 
own and only master, and treat with it as 
sovereign with sovereign. It holds my 
body in its clutches; but my soul escapes 
and braves it. My thought and my love, 
my faith and my hope, are beyond its reach. 
My true being, the essence of my nature, 
myself, remain inviolate and inaccessible 
to the world’s attacks. In this respect we 
are greater than the universe, which has 
mass and not will; we become once more 
independent even in relation to the human 
mass, which also can destroy nothing more 
than our happiness, just as the mass of the 
universe can destroy nothing more than our 
body. — Submission, then, is not defeat; 
on the contrary, it is strength. 


270 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


28th April 1866.—TI have just read the 
procés-verbal of the Conference of Pastors 
held on the 15th and 16th of April at Paris. 
The question of the supernatural has split 
the Church of France in two. The Lib- 
erals insist upon individual right; the 
orthodox upon the notion of a Church. 
And it is true indeed that a Church is an 
affirmation, that it subsists by the positive 
element in it, by definite belief; the pure 
critical element dissolves it. Protestantism 
is a combination of two factors — the au- 
thority of the Scriptures and free inquiry ; 
as soon as one of these factors is threatened 
or disappears, Protestantism disappears ; a 
new form of Christianity succeeds it, as, 
for example, the Church of the Brothers 
of the Holy Ghost, or that of Christian 
Theism. As far as I am concerned, I see 
nothing objectionable in such a result, but 
I think the friends of the Protestant Church 
are logical in their refusal to abandon the 
Apostles’ Creed, and the individualists are 
illogical in imagining that they can keep 
Protestantism and do away with authority. ' 

It is a question of method which sepa- 
rates the two camps. I am fundamentally © 
separated from both. As I understand it, 
Christianity is above all religious, and re- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 271 


ligion is not a method, it is a life, a higher 
and supernatural life, mystical in its root 
and practical in its fruits, a communion 
with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a 
love which radiates, a force which acts, a 
happiness which overflows. Religion, in 
short, is a state of the soul. These quarrels 
as to method have their value, but it is a 
secondary value; they will never console 
a heart or edify a conscience. This is why 
I feel so little interest in these ecclesiastical 
struggles. Whether the one party or the 
other gain the majority and the victory, 
what is essential is in no way profited, for 
dogma, criticism, the Church, are not relig- 
ion ; and it is religion, the sense of a divine 
life, which matters. ‘Seek ye first the 
kingdom of God and his righteousness, and 
all these things shall be added unto you.’ 
The most holy is the most Christian ; this 
_ will always be the criterion which is least 
deceptive. ‘By this ye shall know my 
disciples, if they have love one to another.’ 

As is the worth of the individual, so is 
the worth of his religion. Popular instinct 
and philosophic reason are at one on this 
point. Be good and pious, patient and 
heroic, faithful and devoted, humble and 
charitable ; the catechism which has taught 


272 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


you these things is beyond the reach of 
blame. By religion we live in God ; but all 
these quarrels lead to nothing but life with 
men or with cassocks. There is therefore 
no equivalence between the two points of 
view. 

Perfection as an end, —a noble example 
for sustenance on the way, —the divine 
proved by its own excellence, — is not this 
the whole of Christianity? God manifest 
in all men, is not this its true goal and con- 
summation ? 


20th September 1866.— My old friends 
are, I am afraid, disappointed in me; they 
think that I do nothing, that I have deceived 
their expectations and their hopes. I too 
am disappointed. All that would restore 
my self-respect, and give me a right to be 
proud of myself, seems to me unattainable 
and impossible, and I fall back upon triv- 
ialities, gay talk, distractions. I am always 
equally lacking in hope, in faith, in resolu- 
tion. The only difference is that my weak- 
ness takes sometimes the form of despairing 
melancholy and sometimes that of a cheer- 
ful quietism.— And yet I read, I talk, I 
teach, I write, but to no effect; it is as 
though I were walking in my sleep. The 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 273 


Buddhist tendency in me blunts the faculty 
of free self-government and weakens the 
power of action ; self-distrust kills all de- 
_ sire, and reduces me again and again to a 
fundamental scepticism. I care for noth- 
ing but the serious and the real, and I can 
take neither myself nor my circumstances 
seriously. I hold my own personality, my 
own aptitudes, my own aspirations, too 
cheap. Iam for ever making light of my- 
self in the name of all that is beautiful and 
admirable. In a word, I bear within me 
a perpetual self-detractor, and this is what 
takes all spring out of my life.—I have 
been passing the evening with Charles 
Heim, who, in his sincerity, has never paid 
me any literary compliment. As I love 
and respect him, he is forgiven. Self-love 
has nothing to do with it — and yet it would 
be sweet to be praised by so upright a 
friend! It is depressing to feel oneself 
silently disapproved of ; I will try to satisfy 
him, and to think of a book which may 
please both him and Scherer. 


6th October 1866. —I have just picked up 
on the stairs a little yellowish cat, ugly and 
pitiable. Now, curled up in a chair at my 
side, he seems perfectly happy, and as if 


274 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


he wanted nothing more. Far from being 
wild, nothing will induce him to leave me, 
and he has followed me from room to room 
all day. I have nothing at all that is eata- 
ble in the house, but what I have I give him 
—that is to say, a look and a caress — and 
that seems to be enough for him, at least 
for the moment. Small animals, small 
children, young lives, —they are all the 
same as far as the need of protection and 
of gentleness is concerned. ... People 
have sometimes said to me that weak and 
feeble creatures are happy with me. Per- 
haps such a fact has to do with some special 
gift or beneficent force which flows from 
one when one is in the sympathetic state. 
I have often a direct perception of such a 
force ; but I am no ways proud of it, nor do 
I look upon it as anything belonging to me, 
but simply as a natural gift. It seems to 
me sometimes as though I could woo the 
birds to build in my beard as they do in the 
headgear of some cathedral saint! After 
all, this is the natural state and the true 
relation of man towards all inferior creat- 
ures. If man was what he ought to be he 
would be adored by the animals, of whom 
he is too often the capricious and sangui- 
nary tyrant. The legend of Saint Francis of 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 275 


Assisi is not so legendary as we think ; 
and it is not so certain that it was the wild 
beasts who attacked man first... . But 
to exaggerate nothing, let us leave on one 
side the beasts of prey, the carnivora, and 
those that live by rapine and slaughter. 
How many other species are there, by thou- 
sands and tens of thousands, who ask peace 
from us and with whom we persist in wag- 
ing a brutal war? Our race is by far the 
most destructive, the most hurtful, and 
the most formidable, of all the species of 
the planet. It has even invented for its 
own use the right of the strongest, —a di- 
vine right which quiets its conscience in the 
face of the conquered and the oppressed ; 
we have outlawed all that lives except our- 
selves. Revolting and manifest abuse ; no- 
torious and contemptible breach of the law 
of justice! The bad faith and hypocrisy of 
it are renewed on a small scale by all suc- 
cessful usurpers. We are always making 
God our accomplice, that so we may legalise 
our own iniquities. Every successful mas- 
sacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the 
clergy have never been wanting in benedic- 
tions for any victorious enormity. So that 
what, in the beginning, was the relation of 
man to the animal becomes that of people 
to people and man to man. 


276 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


If so, we have before us an expiation too 
seldom noticed but altogether just. All 
crime must be expiated, and slavery is the 
repetition among men of the sufferings bru- 
tally imposed by man upon other living 
beings ; it is the theory bearing its fruits. 
— The right of man over the animal seems 
to me to cease with the need of defence and 
of subsistence. So that all unnecessary 
murder and torture are cowardice and even 
crime. The animal renders a service of 
utility: man in return owes it a meed of 
protection and of kindness. In a word, the 
animal has claims on man, and the man has 
duties to the animal. — Buddhism, no doubt, 
exaggerates this truth, but the Westerns 
leave it out of count altogether. A day will 
come, however, when our standard will be 
higher, our humanity more exacting, than 
it is to-day. Homo homini lupus, said 
Hobbes: the time will come when man will 
be humane even for the wolf — homo lupo 
homo. 


30th December 1866. — Scepticism pure 
and simple as the only safeguard of intel- 
lectual independence, — such is the point of 
view of almost all our young men of talent. 
Absolute freedom from credulity seems to 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 277 


them the glory of man. My impression has 
always been that this excessive detachment 
of the individual from all received preju- 
dices and opinions in reality does the work 
of tyranny. This evening, in listening to 
the conversation of some of our most culti- 
vated men, I thought of the Renaissance, of 
the Ptolemies, of the reign of Louis XV., 
of all those times in which the exultant 
anarchy of the intellect has had despotic 
government for its correlative, and, on the 
other hand, of England, of Holland, of the 
United States, countries in which political 
liberty is bought at the price of necessary 
prejudices and @ priori opinions. 

That society may hold together at all, we 
must have a principle of cohesion — that is 
to say, a common belief, principles recog- 
nised and undisputed, a series of practical 
axioms and institutions which are not at the 
mercy of every caprice of public opinion. 
By treating everything as if it were an open 
question, we endanger everything. Doubt 
is the accomplice of tyranny. ‘If a people 
will not believe it must obey,’ said Tocque- 
ville. All liberty implies dependence, and 
has its conditions; this is what negative 
and quarrelsome minds are apt to forget. 
They think they can do away with religion ; 


278 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


they do not know that religion is indestruc- 
tible, and that the question is simply, Which 
will you have? Voltaire plays the game of 
Loyola, and vice versa. Between these two 
there is no peace, nor can there be any for 
the society which has once thrown itself 
into the dilemma. The only solution lies 
in a free religion, a religion of free choice 
and free adhesion. 


23d December 1866,— It is raining over 
the whole sky —as far at least as I can see 
from my high point of observation. All is 
gray from the Saléve to the Jura, and from 
the pavement to the clouds ; everything that 
one sees or touches is gray; colour, life, 
and gaiety are dead—each living thing 
seems to lie hidden in its own particular 
shell.— What are the birds doing in such 
weather as this ? We who have food and 
shelter, fire on the hearth, books around us, 
portfolios of engravings close at hand, a 
nestful of dreams in the heart, and a whirl- 
wind of thoughts ready to rise from the ink- 
bottle, — we find Nature ugly and triste, 
and turn away our eyes from it; but you, 
poor sparrows, what can you be doing? 
Bearing and hoping and waiting? After 
all, is not this the task of each one of us ? 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 279 


I have just been reading over a volume 
of this Journal, and feel a little ashamed of 
the languid complaining tone of so much of 
it. These pages reproduce me very imper- 
fectly, and there are many things in me of 
which I find no trace in them. I suppose 
it is because, in the first place, sadness takes 
up the pen more readily than joy ; and, in 
the next, because I depend so much upon 
surrounding circumstances. When there is 
no call upon me, and nothing to put me to 
the test, I fall back into melancholy ; and 
so the practical man, the cheerful man, the 
literary man, does not appear in these pages. 
The portrait is lacking in proportion and 
breadth ; it is one-sided, and wants a centre ; 
it has, as it were, been painted from too 
near. 

The true reason why we know ourselves 
so little lies in the difficulty we find in 
standing at a proper distance from our- 
selves, in taking up the right point of view, 
so that the details may help rather than 
hide the general effect. We must learn to 
look at ourselves socially and historically if 
we wish to have an extra idea of our rela- 
tive worth, and to look at our life as a 
whole, or at least as one complete period 
of life, if we wish to know what we are 


280 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


and what we are not. The ant which 
crawls to and fro over a face, the fly perched 
upon the forehead of a maiden, touch them 
indeed but do not see them, for they never 
embrace the whole at a glance. 

Is it wonderful that misunderstandings 
should play so great a part in the world, 
when one sees how difficult it is to produce 
a faithful portrait of a person whom one 
has been studying for more than twenty 
years? Still, the effort has not been al- 
together lost; its reward has been the 
sharpening of one’s perceptions of the outer 
world. If I have any special power of 
appreciating different shades of mind, I 
owe it no doubt to the analysis I have so 
perpetually and unsuccessfully practised on 
myself. In fact, I have always regarded 
myself as matter of study, and what has 
interested me most in myself has been the 
pleasure of having under my hand a man, 
a person, in whom, as an authentic speci- 
men of human nature, I could follow, with- 
out importunity or indiscretion, all the 
metamorphoses, the secret thoughts, the 
heart-beats, and the temptations of hu- 
manity. My attention has been drawn to 
myself impersonally and philosophically. 
One uses what one has, and one must shape 
one’s arrow out of one’s own wood. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 281 


To arrive at a faithful portrait, succession 
must be converted into simultaneousness, 
plurality into unity, and all the changing 
phenomena must be traced back to their 
essence. There are ten men in me, accord- 
ing to time, place, surrounding, and occa- 
sion ; and in their restless diversity I am 
for ever escaping myself. Therefore, what- 
ever I may reveal of my past, of my Jour- 
nal, or of myself, is of no use to him who 
is without the poetic intuition, and cannot 
‘recompose me as a whole, with or in spite 
-of the elements which I confide to him. 

I feel myself a chameleon, a kaleidoscope, 
a Proteus ; changeable in every way, open 
to every kind of polarisation ; fluid, virtual, 
and therefore latent — latent even in mani- 
festation, and absent even in presentation. 
I am.a spectator, so to speak, of the molec- 
ular whirlwind which men call individual 
life ; Iam conscious of an incessant meta- 
morphosis, an irresistible movement of 
existence, which is going on within me. I 
ain sensible of the flight, the revival, the 
modification, of all the atoms of my being, 
all the particles of my river, all the radia- 
tions of my special force. 

This phenomenology of myself serves 
both as the magic lantern of my own des- 


282 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


tiny, and as a window opened upon tne 
mystery of the world. Iam, or rather, my 
sensible consciousness is concentrated upon 
this ideal standing-point, this invisible 
threshold, as it were, whence one hears the 
impetuous passage of time, rushing and 
foaming as it flows out into the changeless 
ocean of eternity. After all the bewilder- 
ing distractions of life, after having drowned 
myself in a multiplicity of trifles and in the 
caprices of this fugitive existence, yet with- 
out ever attaining to self-intoxication or 
self-delusion, I come again upon the fathom- 
less abyss, the silent and melancholy cavern 
where dwell ‘Die Miitter,’}" where sleeps 
that which neither lives nor dies, that which 
has neither movement, nor change, nor 
extension, nor form, and which lasts when 
all else passes away. 


Dans |’éternel azur de ]’insondable espace 
S’enveloppe de paix notre globe agitée: 
Homme, enveloppe ainsi tes jours, réve qui 
passe, 
Du calme firmament de ton éternité. 
(H. F. Amie, Penseroso.) 


GENEVA, 11th January 1867. 


‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, 
Labuntur anni... .’ - 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 283 


I hear the drops of my life falling distinctly 
one by one into the devouring abyss of 
eternity. I feel my days flying before the 
pursuit of death. All that remains to me 
of weeks, or months, or years, in which I 
may drink in the light of the sun, seems to 
me no more than a single night, a summer 
night, which scarcely counts, because it 
will so soon be at an end. 

Death! Silence! Eternity! What mys- 
_ teries, what names of terror to the being 
who longs for happiness, immortality, per- 
fection! Where shall I be to-morrow —in 
a little while — when the breath of life has 
forsaken me? Where will those be whom 
Ilove? Whither are we all going? The 
eternal problems rise before us in their im- 
placable solemnity. Mystery on all sides! 
And faith the only star in this darkness and 
uncertainty ! 

No matter !—so long as the world is the 
work of eternal goodness, and so long as 
conscience has not deceived us.— To give 
happiness and to do good, there is our only 
law, our anchor of salvation, our beacon 
light, our reason for existing. All religions 
may crumble away ; so long as this survives 
we have still an ideal, and life is worth 
living. 


284 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


Nothing can lessen the dignity and value 
of humanity so long as the religion of love, 
of unselfishness and devotion endures ; and 
none can destroy the altars of this faith for 
us so long as we feel ourselves still capable 
of love. 


15th April 1867 (Seven a.m.) — Rain 
storms in the night—the weather is show- 
ing its April caprice. From the window 
one sees a gray and melancholy sky, and 
roofs glistening with rain. The spring is at 
its work. Yes, and the implacable flight of 
time is driving us towards the grave. Well 
—each has his turn ! 


‘ Allez, allez, 6 jeunes filles, 
Cueillir des bleuets dans les blés !’ 


I am overpowered with melancholy, lan- 
guor, lassitude. A longing for the last 
great sleep has taken possession of me, 
combated, however, by a thirst for sacrifice 
—sacrifice heroic and long-sustained, — 
Are not both simply ways of escape from 
oneself ? ‘Sleep, or self-surrender, that I 
may die to self !’—such is the cry of the 
heart. Poor heart! 


17th April 1867.— Awake, thou that 
sleepest, and rise from the dead. 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 285 


What needs perpetually refreshing and 

renewing in me.is my store of courage. By 
nature I am so easily disgusted with life, I 
fall a prey so readily to despair and pessi- 
mism. 
‘The happy man, as this century is able 
to produce him,’ according to Madame ——, 
is a Weltmiide, one who keeps a brave face 
before the world, and distracts himself as 
best he can from dwelling upon the thought 
which is hidden at his heart—a thought 
which has in it the sadness of death — the 
thought of the irreparable. The outward 
peace of such a man is but despair well 
masked ; his gaiety is the carelessness of a 
heart which has lost all its illusions, and has 
learned to acquiesce in an indefinite putting 
off of happiness. His wisdom is really ac- 
climatisation to sacrifice, his gentleness 
should be taken to mean privation patiently 
borne rather than resignation. In a word, 
he submits to an existence in which he feels 
no joy, and he cannot hide from himself 
that all the alleviations with which it is 
strewn cannot satisfy the soul. The thirst 
for the infinite is never appeased. God is 
wanting. 

To win true peace, a man needs to feel 
himself directed, pardoned, and sustained 


286 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


by a supreme power, to feel himself in the 
right road, at the point where God would 
have him be, —in order with God and the 
universe. This faith gives strength and 
calm. I have not got it. All that is, seems 
to me arbitrary and fortuitous. It may as 
well not be, as be. Nothing in my own cir- 
cumstances seems to me providential. All 
appears to me left to my own responsibility, 
and it is this thought which disgusts me 
with the government of my own life. I 
longed to give myself up wholly to some 
great love, some noble end; I would will- 
ingly have lived and died for the ideal— 
that is to say, fora holy cause. But once 
the impossibility of this made clear to me, 
I have never since taken a serious interest 
in anything, and have, as it were, but 
amused myself with a destiny of which I 
was no longer the dupe. 

Sybarite and dreamer, will you go on like 
this to the end — for ever tossed backwards 
and forwards between duty and happiness, 
incapable of choice, of action ? Is not life 
the test of our moral force, and all these 
inward waverings, are they not temptations 
of the soul ? 


6th September 1867, Weissenstein® (Ten 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 287 


o’clock in the morning). —A marvellous 
view of blinding and bewildering beauty. 
Above a milky sea of cloud, flooded with 
morning light, the rolling waves of which 
are beating up against the base of the 
wooded steeps of the Weissenstein, the vast 
circle of the Alps soars to a sublime height. 
The eastern side of the horizon is drowned 
in the splendours of the rising mists; but 
from the Tédi westward, the whole chain 
floats pure and clear between the milky 
plain and the pale blue sky. The giant as- 
sembly is sitting in council above the valleys 
and the lakes still submerged in vapour. — 
The Clariden, the Spannorter, the Titlis, 
then the Bernese colossi from the Wetter- 
horn to the Diablerets, then the peaks of 
Vaud, Valais, and Fribourg, and beyond 
these high chains the two kings of the Alps, 
Mont Blanc, of a pale pink, and the bluish 
point of Monte Rosa, peering out through 
a cleft in the Doldenhorn: —such is the 
composition of the great snowy amphi- 
theatre. The outline of the horizon takes 
all possible forms: needles, ridges, battle- 
ments, pyramids, obelisks, teeth, fangs,’ 
pincers, horns, cupolas ; the mountain pro- 
file sinks, rises again, twists and sharpens 
itself in a thousand ways, but always so as 


288 AMIEL’S JOURNAL, 


to maintain an angular and serrated line. 
Only the inferior and secondary groups of 
mountains show any large curves or sweep- 
ing undulations of form. The Alps are 
more than an upheaval; they are a tearing 
and gashing of the earth’s surface. Their 
granite peaks bite into the sky instead of 
caressing it. The Jura, on the contrary, 
spreads its broad back complacently under 
the blue dome of air. 


Eleven o’ clock. — The sea of vapour has 
risen and attacked the mountains, which 
for a long time overlooked it like so many 
huge reefs. For a while it surged in vain 
over the lower slopes of the Alps. Then 
rolling back upon itself, it made a more 
successful onslaught upon the Jura, and 
now we are enveloped in its moving waves. 
The milky sea has become one vast cloud, 
which has swallowed up the plain and 
the mountains, observatory and observer. 
Within this cloud one may hear the sheep- 
bells ringing, and see the sunlight darting 
hither and thither. Strange and fanciful 
‘sight ! 

The Hanoverian pianist has gone; the 
family from Colmar has gone; a young girl 
and her brother have arrived. The girl is 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 289 


very pretty, and particularly dainty and ele- 
gant in all her ways; she seems to touch 
things only with the tips of her fingers ; 
one compares her to an ermine, a gazelle. 
But at the same time she has no interests, 
does not know how to admire, and thinks 
of herself more than of anything else. This 
perhaps is a drawback inseparable from a 
beauty and a figure which ‘attract all eyes. 
She is, besides, a townswoman to the core, 
and feels herself out of place in this great 
nature, which probably seems to her bar- 
barous and ill bred. At any rate she does 
not let it interfere with her in any way, and 
parades herself on the mountains with her 
little bonnet and her scarcely perceptible 
sunshade, as though she were on the boule- 
vard. She belongs to that class of tourists 
so amusingly drawn. by Topffer. Charac- 
ter: naive conceit. Country: France. 
Standard of life: fashion. Some clever- 
ness but no sense of reality, no understand- 
ing of nature, no consciousness of the 
manifold diversities of the world and of the 
right of life to be what it is, and to follow 
its own way and not ours. 

This ridiculous element in her is con- 
nected with the same national prejudice 
which holds France to be the centre point 


290 AMIEL’S JOURNAL, 


of the world, and leads Frenchmen to neg- 
lect geography and languages. ‘The ordi- 
nary French townsman is really deliciously 
stupid in spite of all his natural cleverness, 
for he understands nothing but himself. 
His pole, his axis, his centre, his all is 
Paris, — or even less, — Parisian manners, 
the taste of the day, fashion. Thanks to 
this organised fetishism, we have millions 
of copies of one single original pattern; a 
whole people moving together like bobbins 
in the same machine, or the legs of a single 
corps @armée. The result is wonderful but 
_Wearisome ; wonderful in point of material 
strength, wearisome psychologically. <A 
hundred thousand sheep are not more in- 
structive than one sheep, but they furnish 
a hundred thousand times more wool, meat, 
and manure. This is all, you may say, 
that the shepherd —that is, the master — 
requires. Very well, but one can only 
maintain breeding-farms or monarchies on 
these principles. For a republic you must 
have men: it cannot get on without indi- 
vidualities. 


Noon. —An exquisite effect. A great 
herd of cattle are running across the mead- 
ows under my window, which is just illumi- 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 291 


nated by a furtive ray of sunshine. The 
picture has a ghostly suddenness and brill- 
iancy; it pierces the mists which close 
upon it, like the slide of a magic lantern. 
What a pity I must leave this place now 
that oe is so bright ! 


The Sedu. sea says more és the thoughtful 
soul than the same sea in storm and tumult. 
But we need the understanding of eternal 
things and the sentiment of the infinite to 
be able to feel this. The divine state par 
excellence is that of silence and repose, be- 
cause all speech and all action are in them- 
selves limited and fugitive. Napoleon with 
his arms crossed over his breast is more 
expressive than the furious Hercules beat- 
ing the air with his athlete’s fists. People 
of passionate temperament never under- 
stand this. They are only sensitive to the 
energy of succession; they know nothing 
of the energy of condensation. They can 
only be impressed by acts and effects, by 
noise and effort. They have no instinct 
of contemplation, no sense of the pure 
cause, the fixed source of all movement, 
the principle of all effects, the centre of all 
light, which does not need to spend itself 
in order to be sure of its own wealth, nor 


292 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


to throw itself into violent motion to be 
certain of its own power. The art of pas- 
sion is sure to please, but it is not the high- 
est art; it is true, indeed, that under the 
rule of democracy, the serener and calmer 
forms of art become more and more diffi- 
cult ; the turbulent herd no longer knows 
the gods. 


Minds accustomed to analysis never al- 
low objections more than a half-value, be- 
cause they appreciate the variable and 
relative elements which enter in. 

A well-governed mind learns in time to 
find pleasure in nothing but the true and 
the just. 


10th January 1868 (Eleven p.m.) — We 
have had a philosophical meeting at the 
house of Edouard Claparéde.!® ‘The ques- 
tion on the order of the day was the nature 
of sensation. Claparéde pronounced for 
the absolute subjectivity of all experience — 
in other words, for pure idealism — which 
is amusing from a naturalist. According 
to him the ego alone exists, and the uni- 
verse is but a projection of the ego, a 
phantasmagoria which we ourselves create 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 293 


without-suspecting it, believing all the time 
that we are lookers-on. It is our noitimenon 
which objectifies itself as phenomenon. 
The ego, according to him, is a radiating 
force which, modified without knowing 
what it is that modifies it, imagines it, by 
virtue of the principle of causality — that 
is to say, produces the great illusion of the 
objective world in order so to explain itself. 
Our waking life, therefore, is but a more 
connected dream. ‘The self is an unknown 
which gives birth to an infinite number of 
unknowns, by a fatality of its nature. 
Science is summed up in the consciousness 
that nothing exists but consciousness. In 
other words, the intelligent issues from the 
unintelligible in order to return to it, or 
rather the ego explains itself by the hypoth- 
esis of the non-ego, while in reality it is 
but a dream, dreaming itself. We might 
say with Scarron — 


‘ Et je vis l’ombre d’un esprit 
Qui tragait l’ombre d’un systéme 
Avec l’ombre de l’ombre méme.’ 


This abolition of nature by natural science 
is logical, and it was, in fact, Schelling’s 
starting-point. From the standpoint of 
physiology, nature is but a necessary illu- 


294 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


sion, a constitutional hallucination. We 
only escape from this bewitchment by the 
moral activity of the ego, which feels itself 
a cause and a free cause, and which by its 
responsibility breaks the spell and issues 
from the enchanted circle of Maia. 

Maia! Is she indeed the true goddess ? 
Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the 
world as the dream of Brahma. Must we 
hold with Fichte that it is the individual 
dream of each individual ego? Every fool 
would then be a cosmogonic poet producing 
the firework of the universe under the dome 
of the infinite.— But why then give our- 
selves such gratuitous trouble to learn? In 
our dreams, at least, nightmare excepted, 
we endow ourselves with complete ubiquity, 
liberty,and omniscience. Are we then less 
ingenious and inventive awake than asleep ? 


25th January 1868.—It is when the 
outer man begins to decay that it becomes 
vitally important to us to believe in immor- 
tality, and to feel with the Apostle that the 
inner man is renewed from day to day.— 
But for those who doubt it and have no 
hope of it? For them the remainder of 
life can only be the compulsory dismember- 
ment of their small empire, the gradual 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 295 


dismantling of their being by inexorable 
destiny. How hard it is to bear — this 
long-drawn death, of which the stages are 
melancholy and the end inevitable! It is 
easy to see why it was that Stoicism main- 
tained the right of suicide. — What is my 
real faith? Has the universal, or at any 
rate the very general and common doubt of 
science, invaded me in my turn? I have 
defended the cause of the immortality of 
the soul against those who questioned it, 
and yet when I have reduced them to 
silence, I have scarcely known whether at 
bottom I was not after all on their side. Itry 
to do without hope; but it is possible that 
I have no longer the strength for it, and 
that, like other men, I must be sustained 
and consoled by a belief, by the belief in 
pardon and immortality — that is to say, by 
religious belief of the Christian type. Rea- 
son and thought grow tired, like muscles 
and nerves. They must have their sleep, 
and this sleep is the relapse into the tradi- 
tion of childhood, into the common hope. 
It takes so much effort to maintain oneself 
in an exceptional point of view, that one 
falls back into prejudice by pure exhaus- 
tivn, just as the man who stands indefinitely 
always ends by sinking to the ground and 
reassuming the horizontal position. 


296 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


What is to become of us when everything 
leaves us, — health, joy, affections, the 
freshness of sensation, memory, capacity 
for work, — when the sun seems to us to 
have lost its warmth, and life is stripped of 
all its charm? What is to become of us 
without hope? Must we either harden or 
forget ? — There is but one answer, — keep 
close to duty. Never mind the future, if 
only you have peace of conscience, if you 
feel yourself reconciled, and in harmony 
with the order of things. Be what you 
ought to be; the rest is God’s affair. Itis 
for Him to know what is best, to take care 
of His own glory, to ensure the happiness 
of what depends on Him, whether by an- 
other life or by annihilation. And suppos- 
ing that there were no good and holy God, 
nothing but universal being, the law of the 
all, an ideal without hypostasis or reality, 
duty would still be the key of the enigma, 
the pole-star of a wandering humanity. 


‘Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra.’ 


26th January 1868. — Blessed be child- 
hood, which brings down something of 
heaven into the midst of our rough earthli- 
ness. These 80,000 daily births, of which 
statistics tell us, represent as it were an 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 297 


effusion of innocence and freshness, strug- 
gling not only against the death of the race, 
but against human corruption, and the 
universal gangrene of sin. All the good 
and wholesome feeling which is intertwined 
with childhood and the cradle is one of the 
secrets of the providential government of 
the world. Suppress this life-giving dew, 
and human society would be scorched and 
devastated by selfish passion. Supposing 
that humanity had been composed of a 
thousand millions of immortal beings, 
whose number could neither increase nor 
diminish, where should we be, and what 
should we be! A thousand times more 
learned, no doubt, but a thousand times 
more evil. There would have been a vast 
accumulation of science, but all the virtues 
engendered by suffering and devotion — 
that is to say, by the family and society — 
would have no existence. And for this 
there would be no compensation. 

Blessed be childhood for the good that it 
does, and for the good which it brings 
about carelessly and unconsciously, by 
simply making us love it and letting itself 
be loved. What little of Paradise we see 
still on earth is due to its presence among 
us. Without fatherhood, without mother- 


298 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


hood, I think that love itself would not be 
enough to prevent men from devouring 
each other ~ men, that is to say, such as 
human passions have made them. The 
angels have no need of birth and death as 
foundations for their life, because their life 
is heavenly. ; 


16th February 1868. —I have been finish- 
ing About’s Mainfroy (Les Mariages de 
Province). What subtlety, what clever- 
ness, what verve, what aplomb! About is 
a master of epithet, of quick light-winged 
satire. For all his cavalier freedom of 
manner, his work is conceived at bottom in 
a spirit of the subtlest irony, and his de- 
tachment of mind is so great that he is able 
to make sport of everything, to mock at 
others and himself, while all the time 
amusing himself extremely with his own 
ideas and inventions. This is indeed the 
characteristic mark, the common signature, 
so to speak, of esprit like his. 

Irrepressible mischief, indefatigable elas- 
ticity, a power of luminous mockery, de- 
light in the perpetual discharge of innumer- 
able arrows from an inexhaustible quiver, 
the unquenchable laughter of some little 
earth-born demon, perpetual gaiety, and a 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 299 


radiant force of epigram,—there are all 
these in the true humorist. Stulti sunt 
innumerabiles, said Erasmus, the ‘patron 
of all these dainty mockers. Folly, con- 
ceit, foppery, silliness, affectation, hypoc- 
risy, attitudinising and pedantry of all 
shades, and in all forms, everything that 
poses, prances, bridles, struts, bedizens, 
and plumes itself, everything that takes 
itself seriously and tries to impose itself on 
mankind, — all this is the natural prey of 
the satirist, so many targets ready for 
his arrows, so many victims offered to his 
attack. And we all know how rich the 
world is in prey of this kind! An alder- 
man’s feast of folly is served up to him 
in perpetuity; the spectacle of society 
offers him an endless noce de Gamache.™ 
With what glee he raids through his 
domains, and what signs of destruction 
and massacre mark the path of the sports- 
man! His hand is infallible like his glance. 
The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in 
the midst of universal wreck ; its balls are 
enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it 
braves retaliations and reprisals because 
itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magi- 
cal nothing. 

Clever men will recognise and tolerate 


300 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


nothing but cleverness; every authority 
rouses their ridicule, every superstition 
amuses them, every convention moves 
them to contradiction. Only force finds 
favour in their eyes, and they have no 
toleration for anything that is not purely 
natural and spontaneous. And yet ten 
clever men are not worth one man of 
talent, nor ten men of talent worth one 
man of genius. And in the individual, 
feeling is more than cleverness, reason is 
worth as much as feeling, and conscience 
has it over reason. If, then, the clever 
man is not mockable, ue may at least be 
neither loved, nor considered, nor esteemed. 
He may make himself feared, it is true, 
and force others to respect his indepen- 
dence ; but this negative advantage, which 
is the result of a negative superiority, 
brings no happiness with it. Cleverness is 
serviceable for everything, sufficient for 


nothing. 


8th March 1868. — Madame —— kept me 
to have tea with three young friends of hers 
—three sisters, I think. The two youn- 
gest are extremely pretty, the dark one as 
pretty as the blonde. Their fresh faces, 
radiant’ with the bloom of youth, were a 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 301 


perpetual delight to the eye. This electric 
force of beauty has a beneficent effect upon 
the man of letters ; it acts as a real restora- 
tive. Sensitive, impressionable, absorbent 
as I am, the neighbourhood of health, of 
beauty, of intelligence and of goodness, ex- 
ercises a powerful influence upon my whole 
being ; and in the same way I am troubled 
and affected just as easily by the presence 
near me of troubled lives or diseased souls. 
Madame —— said of me that I ‘must be 
‘superlatively feminine’ in all my percep- 
tions. This ready sympathy and sensitive- 
ness is the reason of it. If I had but 
desired it ever so little, I should have had 
the magical clairvoyance of the somnambu- 
list, and could have reproduced in myself a 
number of strange phenomena. I know it, 
but I have always been on my guard against 
it, whether from indifference or from pru- 
dence. When I think of the intuitions of 
every kind which have come to me since 
my youth, it seems to me that I have lived 
a multitude of lives. Every characteristic 
individuality shapes itself ideally in me, or 
rather moulds me for the moment into its 
own image; and I have only to turn my 
attention upon myself at such a time to be 
able to understand a new mode of being, a 


302 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


new phase of human nature. In this way 
I have been, turn by turn, mathematician, 
musician, savant, monk, child, or mother. 
In these states of universal sympathy I 
have even seemed to myself sometimes to 
enter into the condition of the animal or 
the plant, and even of an individual animal, 
of a given plant. This faculty of ascending 
and descending metamorphosis, this power 
of simplifying or of adding to one’s individ- 
uality, has sometimes astounded my friends, 
even the most subtle of them. It has to do 
no doubt with the extreme facility which I 
have for impersonal and objective thought, 
and this again accounts for the difficulty 
which I feel in realising my own individu- 
ality, in being simply one man having his 
proper number and ticket. To withdraw 
within my own individual limits has always 
seemed to me a strange, arbitrary, and con- 
ventional process. I seem to myself to be a 
mere conjuror’s apparatus, an instrument 
of vision and perception, a person without 
personality, a subject without any deter- 
wined individuality — an instance, to speak 
technically, of pure ‘ determinability ’ — and 
‘ formability,’—and therefore I can only 
resign myself with difficulty to play the 
purely arbitrary part of a private citizen, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 303 


inscribed upon the roll of a particular town 
or a particular country. In action I feel 
myself out of place ; my true milieu is con- 
templation. Pure virtuality and perfect 
equilibrium —in these I am most at home. 
There I feel myself free, disinterested, and 
sovereign. Is it a call or a temptation ? 

It represents perhaps the oscillation be- 
tween the two geniuses, the Greek and the 
Roman, the eastern and the western, the 
ancient and the Christian, or the struggle 
between the two ideals, that of liberty and 
that of holiness. Liberty raises us to the 
gods ; holiness prostrates us on the ground. 
Action limits us; whereas in the state of 
contemplation we are endlessly expansive. 
Will localises us ; thought universalises us. 
My soul wavers between half a dozen an- 
tagonistic general conceptions, because it is 
responsive to all the great instincts of hu- 
man nature, and its aspiration is to the ab- 
solute, which is only to be reached through 
a succession of contraries. It has taken me 
a great deal of time to understand myself, 
and I frequently find myself beginning over 
again the study of the oft-solved problem, 
so difficult is it for us to maintain auy fixed 
point within us. I love everything, and 
detest one thing only —the hopeless im- 


304 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


prisonment of my being within a single 
arbitrary form, even were it chosen by my- 
self. Liberty for the inner man is then the 
strongest of my passions— perhaps my only 
passion. Issuch a passion lawful? It has 
been my habit to think so, but intermit- 
tently, by fits and starts. I am not per- 
fectly sure of it. 


17th March 1868.— Women wish to be 
loved without a why or a wherefore ; not 
because they are pretty, or good, or well 
bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but be- 
cause they are themselves. All analysis 
seems to them to imply a loss of considera- 
tion, a subordination of their personality to 
something which dominates and measures 
it. They will have none of it; and their 
instinct is just. As soon as we can give a 
reason for a feeling we are no longer under 
the spell of it; we appreciate, we weigh, 
we are free, at least in principle. Love 
must always remain a fascination, a witch- 
ery, if the empire of woman is to endure. 
Once the mystery gone, the power goes with 
it. Love must always seem to us indivisi- 
ble, insoluble, superior to all analysis, if it 
is to preserve that appearance of infinity, 
of something supernatural and miraculous, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 305 


which makes its chief beauty. The major- 
ity of beings despise what they understand, 
and bow only before the inexplicable. The 
feminine triumph par excellence is to con- 
vict of obscurity that virile intelligence 
which makes so much pretence to enlight- 
enment. And when a woman inspires love, 
it is then especially that she enjoys this 
proud triumph. —I admit that her exulta- 
tion has, its grounds. Still, it seems to 
me that love —true and profound love — 
should be a source of light and calm, a re- 
ligion and a revelation, in which there is no 
place left for the lower victories of vanity. 
Great souls care only for what is great, and 
to the spirit which hovers in the sight of 
the Infinite, any sort of artifice seems a 
disgraceful puerility. 


19th March 1868.— What we call little 
things are merely the causes of great 
things ; they are the beginning, the embryo, 
and it is the point of departure which, gen- 
erally speaking, decides the whole future 
of an existence. One single black speck 
may be the beginning of a gangrene, of a 
storm, of a revolution. From one insig- 
nificant misunderstanding hatred and sepa- 
ration may finally issue. An enormous 


306 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


avalanche begins by the displacement of 
one atom, and the conflagration of a town 
by the fall of a match. Almost everything 
comes from almost nothing, one might 
think. It is only the first crystallisation 
which is the affair of mind; the ultimate 
aggregation is the affair of mass, of attrac- 
tion, of acquired momentum, of mechanical 
acceleration. History, like nature, illus- 
trates for us the application of the law of 
inertia and agglomeration which is put 
lightly in the proverb, ‘Nothing succeeds 
like success,’ Find the right point at start- 
ing ; strike straight, begin well ; everything 
depends on it. Or more simply still, — pro- 
vide yourself with good luck, — for accident 
plays a vast part in human affairs. Those 
who have succeeded most in this world 
(Napoleon or Bismarck) confess it; calcu- 
lation is not without its uses, but chance 
makes mock of calculation, and the result 
of a planned combination is in no wise pro- 
portional to its merit. From the super- 
natural point of view people say: ‘ This 
chance, as you call it, is, in reality, the 
action of providence. Man may give him- 
self what trouble he will, — God leads him 
all the same.’ Only, unfortunately, this 
supposed intervention as often as not ends 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 307 


in the defeat of zeal, virtue, and devotion, 
and the success of crime, stupidity, and 
selfishness. Poor, sorely-tried Faith! She 
has but one way out of the difficulty — the 
word Mystery!—It is in the origins of 
things that the great secret of destiny lies 
hidden, although the breathless sequence 
of after events has often many surprises 
for us too. So that at first sight history 
seems to us accident and confusion ; looked 
at for the second time, it seems to us logical 
and necessary ; looked at for the third time, 
it appears to us a mixture of necessity and 
liberty; on the fourth examination we 
scarcely know what to think of it, for if 
force is the source of right and chance the 
origin of force, we come back to our first 
explanation, only with a heavier heart than 
when we began. 

Is Democritus right after all? Is Chance 
the foundation of everything, all laws being 
but the imaginations of our reason, which, 
itself born of accident, has a certain power 
of self-deception and of inventing laws 
which it believes to be real and objective, 
just as a man who dreams of a meal thinks 
that he is eating, while in reality there is 
neither table nor food nor guest nor nour- 
ishment? Everything goes on as if there 


308 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


were order and reason and logic in the 
world, while in reality everything is fortui- 
tous, accidental, and apparent. The uni- 
verse is but the kaleidoscope which turns 
within the mind of the so-called thinking 
being, who is himself a curiosity without a 
cause, an accident conscious of the great 
accident around him, and who amuses him- 
self with it so long as the phenomenon of 
his vision lasts. Science is a lucid madness 
occupied in tabulating its own necessary 
hallucinations. — The philosopher laughs, 
for he alone escapes being duped, while he 
sees other men the victims of persistent 
illusion. He is like some mischievous spec- 
tator of a ball who has cleverly taken all 
the strings from the violins, and yet sees 
musicians and dancers moving and pirouet- 
ting before him as though the music were still 
going on. Such an experience would de- 
light him as proving that the universal St. 
Vitus’ dance is also nothing but an aberra- 
tion of the inner consciousness, and that 
the philosopher is in the right of it as 
against the general credulity. Is it not even 
enough simply to shut one’s ears in a ball- 
room, to believe oneself in a mad-house ? 
The multitude of religions on the earth 
must have very much the same effect upon 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 309 


the man who has killed the religious idea 
in himself. But it is a dangerous attempt, 
this repudiation of the common law of the 
race —this claim to be in the right, as 
against all the world. 

It is not often that the philosophic scoffers 
forget themselves for others. Why should 
they ? Self-devotion isa serious thing, and 
seriousness would be inconsistent with their 
role of mockery. To be unselfish we must 
love ; to love we must believe in the reality 
of what we love; we must know how to 
suffer, how to forget ourselves, how to yield 
ourselves up, — in a word, how to be serious. 
A spirit of incessant mockery means abso- 
lute isolation ; it is the sign of a thorough- 
going egotism. If we wish to do good to 
men we must pity and not despise them. 
We must learn to say of them, not ‘ What 
fools!’ but ‘What unfortunates!’ The 
pessimist or the Nihilist seems to me less 
cold and icy than the mocking atheist. He 
reminds me of the sombre words of Ahas- 
vérus : — 


‘ Vous qui manquez de charité, 
Tremblez & mon supplice étrange: 
Ce n’est point sa divinité, 

C’est ’humanité que Dieu venge !’ 2! 


310 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 


It is better to be lost than te be saved all 
alone; and it is a wrong to one’s kind to 
wish to be wise without making others 
share our wisdom. It is, besides, an illu- 
sion to suppose that such a privilege is 
possible, when everything proves the soli- 
darity of individuals, and when no one can 
think at all except by means of the general 
store of thought, accumulated and refined 
by centuries of cultivation and experience. 
Absolute individualism is an absurdity. A 
man may be isolated in his own particular 
and temporary milieu, but every one of our 
thoughts or feelings finds, has found, and 
will find, its echo in humanity. Such an 
echo is immense and far-resounding in the 
case of those representative men who have 
been adopted by great fractions of human- 
ity as guides, revealers, and reformers ; but 
it exists for everybody. Every sincere 
utterance of the soul, every testimony faith- 
fully borne to a personal conviction, is of 
use to some one and some thing, even when 
you know it not, and when your mouth is 
stopped by violence, or the noose tightens 
round your neck. A word spoken to some 
one preserves an indestructible influence, 
just as any movement whatever may be 
inctamorphosed, but not undone. — Here, 


AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 311 


then, is a reason for not mocking, for not 
being silent, for affirming, for acting. We 
must have faith in truth ; we must seek the 
true and spread it abroad ; we must love 
men and serve them, 


9th April 1868.—I have been spend- 
ing three hours over Lotze’s big volume 
(Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland). 
Tt begins attractively, but the attraction 
wanes, and by the end I was very tired of 
it. Why? Because the noise of a mill- 
wheel sends one to sleep, and these pages 
without paragraphs, these interminable 
chapters, and this incessant dialectical 
clatter, affect me as though I were listening 
to a word-mill. I end by yawning like any 
simple non-philosophical mortal in the face 
of all this heaviness and pedantry. Erudi- 
tion, and even thought, are not everything. 
An occasional touch of esprit, a little 
sharpness of phrase, a little vivacity, imagi- 
nation, and grace, would spoil neither. 
Do these pedantic books leave a single 
image or formula, a single new or striking 
fact behind them in the memory, when one 
puts them down? No; nothing but con- 
fusion and fatigue. Oh for clearness, 
terseness, brevity! Diderot, Voltaire, and 


12 AMIEL’S JOURNAL. 
3 


even Galiani! A short article by Sainte- 
Beuve, Scherer, Renan, Victor Cherbuliez, 
gives one more pleasure, and makes one 
think and reflect more, than a thousand of 
these heavy German pages, stuffed to the 
brim, and showing rather the work itself 
than its results. The Germans gather fuel 
for the pile: it is the French who kindle it. 
‘For heaven’s sake, spare me your lucubra- 
tions; give me facts or ideas. Keep your 
vats, your must, your dregs, in the back- 
ground. What I ask is wine — wine which 
will sparkle in the glass, and stimulate in- 
telligence instead of weighing it down. 


END OF VOL. L 


NOTES. 


[A few of the following notes are translated from 
the French edition of the Journal.]} 


1. P. 3.—Amiel left Geneva for Paris and 
Berlin in April 1843, the preceding year, 1841- 
42, having been spent in Italy and Sicily. 


2. P. 7.— Angelus Silesius, otherwise Jo- 
hannes Scheffler, the German seventeenth-cen- 
tury hymn-writer, whose tender and mystical 
verses have been popularised in England by 
Miss Winkworth’s translations in the Lyra 
Germanica. 


3. P.17.—Of these Marheineke, Neander, 
‘and Lachmann had been lecturing at Berlin 
during Amiel’s residence there. The Danish 
dramatic poet Oelenschlager and the Swedish 
writer Tegner were among the Scandinavian 
men of letters with whom he made acquaint- 
ance during his tour in Sweden and Denmark 
in 1845. He probably came across the Swed- 
ish historian Geijer on the same occasion. 
Schelling and Alexander von Humboldt, men- 
tioned a little lower down, were also still 
holding sway at Berlin when he was a stu- 


313 


314 NOTES, 


dent. There is an interesting description in 
one of his articles on Berlin, published in the 
Bibliotheque Universelle de Genéve, of a Uni- 
versity ceremonial there in or about 1847, and 
of the effect produced on the student’s young 
imagination by the sight of half the leaders 
of European research gathered into a single 
room. He saw Schlosser, the veteran histo- 
rian, at Heidelberg at the end of 1843, 


4, P. 22.— Arnold Ruge, born in 1803, died 
at Brighton in 1880, principal editor of the 
Hallische, afterwards the Deutsche Jahrbiicher 
(1838-43), in which Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and 
Louis Feuerbach wrote. He was a member of 
the Parliament of Frankfort. 


5. P. 37.—Compare Clough’s lines — 


* Where are the great, whom thou would’st wish to 


praise thee ? 
Where are the pure, whom thou would’st choose to 


love thee ? 
Where are the brave, to stand supreme above thee, 
Whose high commands would cheer, whose chid- 
ings raise thee ? 
Seek, seeker, in thyself; submit to find 
In the stones, bread, and life in the blank mind.’ 


6. P. 44.— Christian Frederick Krause, died 
1832, Hegel’s younger contemporary, and the 
author of a system which he called panenthe- 
ism, — Amiel alludes to it later on. 


7. P.45.—A village near Geneya. 


NOTES. 315 


8. P. 51.— The allusions in this passage are 
to Topffer’s best known books, — Le Presby- 
tére and La Bibliotheque de mon Oncle, that 
airy chronicle of a hundred romantic or viva- 
cious nothings which has the young student 
Jules for its centre. 


9. P. 53. —Jacob-Elysée Cellérier, Professor 
of theology at the Academy of Geneva, and 
son of the pastor of Satigny mentioned in 
Madame de Staél’s L’ Allemagne. 


10. P. 118.— Geschichte der Poesie, by Ro- 
senkrantz, the pupil and biographer of Hegel. 


11. P. 136.— Also a yillage in the neigh- 
bourhood of Geneva. 


12. P. 161.— The well-known Genevese 
preacher and writer, Ernest Naville, the son 
of a Genevese pastor, was born in 1816, be- 
came Professor at the Academy of Geneva in 
1844, lost his post after the Revolution of 1846, 
and, except for a short interval in 1860, has 
since then held no official position. His 
courses of theological lectures, delivered at 
intervals from 1859 onwards, were an extraor- 
dinary success.. They were at first confined 
to men only, and an audience of 2000 persons 
sometimes assembled to hear them. To litera- 
ture he is mainly known as the editor of Maine 
de Biran’s Journal. 


316 NOTES. 


13. P.171.—Joseph Geerres, a German mys. 
tic and disciple of Schelling. He published, 
among other works, Mythengeschichte der 
Asiatischen Welt, and Christliche Mystik. 


14. P. 187.—The following passage from 
Sainte-Beuve may be taken as a kind of 
answer by anticipation to this accusation, 
which Amiel brings more than once in the 
course of the Journal : — 


‘ Toute nation livrée & elle-eméme et A son propre 
génie se fait une critique littéraire qui y est con- 
forme. La France en son beau temps a eu la 
sienne, qui ne ressemble ni & celle de |’Allemagne 
ni 4 celle de ses autres voisins ;— un peu plus super- 
ficielle, dira-t-on;—je ne le crois pas: mais plus 
vive, moins chargée d’érudition, moins théorique et 
systématique, plus confiante au sentiment immédiat 
du goat. Un peu de chaque chose et rien de Ven- 
semble, a la Frangaise ; telle était la devise de Mon- 
taigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique 
francaise. Nous ne sommes pas synthétiques, 
comme diraient les Allemands; le mot méme n’est 
pas frangais. L’imagination de détail nous suftit. 
Montaigne, La Fontaine, Madame de Sévigné, sont 
volontiers nos livres de chevet.’ 


The French critic then goes on to give a 
rapid sketch of the authors and the books, 
‘qui ont peu a peu formé comme notre rhéto- 
rique.’ French criticism of the old character- 
istic kind rests ultimately upon the minute and 
delicate knowledge of a few Greek and Latin 
classics. Arnauld, Boileau, Fénelon, Rollin, 


NOTES. 317 


Racine fils, Voltaire, La Harpe, Marmontel, 
Delille, Fontanes, and Chateaubriand in one 
aspect, are the typical names of this tradition, 
the creators and maintainers of this common 
literary fonds, this ‘sorte de circulation cou- 
rante a l’usage des gens instruits. J’avoue 
ma faiblesse: nous sommes devenus bien plus 
forts dans la dissertation érudite, mais j’aurais 
un éternel regret pour cette moyenne et plus 
libre habitude littéraire qui laissait & l’imagi- 
nation tout son espace et a l’esprit tout son 
jeu; qui formait une atmosphére saine et 
facile ot le talent respirait et se mouvait a 
son gré: cette atmosphére-la, je ne la trouve 
plus, et je la regrette.’— (Chateau-briand et 
son Groupe Littéraire, vol. i. p. 311.) 

The following pensée of La Bruyére applies 
to the second half of Amiel’s criticism of the 
French mind: ‘If you wish to travel in the 
Inferno or the Paradiso you must take other 
guides,’ etc. — 

‘Un homme né Chrétien et Frangois se trouve 
contraint dans la satyre; les grands sujets lui sont 
défendus, il les entame quelquefois, et se détourne 
ensuite sur de petites choses qu’il reléve par la 
beauté de son génie et de son style.’ — (Les Carac- 
téres, etc., ‘ Des Ouvrages de I’ Esprit.’) 


15. P. 223.— The Vouache is the hill which 
bounds the horizon of Geneva to the south- 
west. 


16. P. 229.—The saying of Pascal’s alluded 
to is in the Pensées, Art. xi. No. 10: ‘A mesure 


318 : NOTES. 


qu’on a plus d’esprit on trouve qu’il y a plus 
d’hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne 
trouvent pas de différence entre les hommes.’ 


17. P. 282.—‘ Die Miitter’ —an allusion to 
a strange and enigmatical, but very effective, 
conception in Faust (Part II. Act I. Scene v.). 
Die Miitter are the prototypes, the abstract 
forms, the generative ideas, of things. ‘Sie 
sehn dich nicht, denn Schemen sehn sie nur.’ 
Goethe borrowed the term from a passage of 
Plutarch’s, but he has made the idea half 
Platonic, half legendary. Amiel, however, 
seems rather to have in his mind Faust’s 
speech in Scene vii. than the speech of Mephis- 
topheles in Scene v. — 


*In eurem Namen, Miitter, die ihr thront 
Im Grinzenlosen, ewig einsam wohnt, 
Und doch gesellig! Euer Haupt umschweben 
Des Lebens Bilder, regsam, ohne Leben. 
Was einmal war, in allem Glanz und Schein, 
Es regt sich dort; denn es will ewig sein. 
Und ihr vertheilt es, allgewaltige Miichte, 
Zum Zelt des Tages, zum Gewdlb’ der Nichte.’ 


18. P. 286.— Weissenstein is a high point 
in the Jura, above Soleure. 


19. P. 292.— Edouard Claparéde, a Gene- 
vese naturalist, born 1832, died 1871. 


20. P. 299.— Noce de Gamache =‘ repas trés 
somptueux.’— Littré. The allusion, of course, 
is to Don Quixote, Part II. cap. xx.— ‘Donde 


NOTES. 319 


se cuentan las bodas de Camacho el rico, con 
el suceso de Basilio el pobre.’ 


21; P. 309. — The quotation is from Quinet’s 
Ahasvérus (first published 1833), that strange 
Welt-gedicht, which the author himself de- 
scribed as ‘l’histoire du monde, de Dieu dans 
le monde, et enfin du doute dans le monde,’ 
and which, with Faust, probably suggested 
the unfinished but in many ways brilliant 
performance of the young Spaniard, Espron- 
ceda, — El Diablo Mundo. 








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